[maemo-users] incremental backups for your device with rdiff-backup

[From: Marius Vollmer]

"ext maemo-users-bounces at maemo.org" <maemo-users-bounces at maemo.org> writes:

> And the big problem with aptitude is that if you use apt as well as 
> aptitude, apt never puts the packages apt installed into its data base 
> as being explicitly requested -- so on various occasions it discovers 
> they are no longer needed and so proposes to remove them.

Exactly, that's why I gave up on it when it proposed to remove half of
Gnome when I used it the first time... :-)

> Does the Application manager do these things too?

It does it the other way around: it keeps a database of the packages
that have been installed automatically to satisfy dependencies.
Whenever a package is removed, its dependencies are checked and
removed as well if they are no longer needed are in the list of
'automatically installed packages'.

Thus, the AM is more conservative with removals.  It will not
automatically remove a package that it hasn't installed in the first
place.

(libapt-pkg maintains a 'auto' bit for each package in its in-core
data structures, but it doesn't save it to disk.  That could be fixed
and aptitude and the AM could then drop their own databases, and would
even correctly interoperate with apt-get at that point, hopefully.)