[CentOS] Easy way to strip down CentOS?

Wed Feb 25 19:18:58 UTC 2015
Brian Mathis <brian.mathis+centos at betteradmin.com>

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 2:04 PM, Niki Kovacs <info at 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-by-date-of-installation-update

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