On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 2:04 PM, Niki Kovacs info@microlinux.fr wrote:
Le 25/02/2015 19:36, John R Pierce a écrit :
I install from the 'minimum' ISO, and get that off the bat, then just install the packages I need with yum
I do the same, but my question is: how to do that the other way around? Let's say you start from the base system, then install a couple dozen command-line utilities from cowsay to whois, then you install the "X Window System" group, a couple dozen fonts, then the WindowMaker window manager, then a handful of X applications... how do you manage from there to get back to exactly the base system you had from the start? I know this may sound a little academic, but it's for a little private experiment here.
Niki
It's not automatic so maybe not what you're looking for, but reviewing the yum log in /var/log/ will give you a chronological list of what packages were installed, so you could use that create a list of packages to remove. Be careful about updates that masquerade as installations, like kernel packages.
You could also query by install date as outlined here:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2291/centos-list-the-installed-rpms-...
I don't think there's a single yum command that lets you roll back to the packages the were installed at a given point in time. I also don't think that this would get you back to the *exact* system as it was. Linux packages aren't completely self contained like that, and have the potential to make other changes to the system, so it's not a completely clean rollback. At minimum, you'd have rpmsave files laying around, probably empty directories, etc...
❧ Brian Mathis @orev