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   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</title>
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  14  <h1>
  15      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  16
  17  </h1>
  18
  19 </div>
  20
  21
  22     <div class="entry">
  23       <div class="title">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</div>
  24       <div class="date">16th June 2010</div>
  25       <div class="body"><p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
  26 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
  27 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
  28 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
  29 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
  30 this:
  31
  32 <blockquote><pre>
  33 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
  34 tasksel --new-install
  35 </pre></blockquote>
  36
  37 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
  38 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
  39 any output what so ever.
  40
  41 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
  42 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
  43 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
  44 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
  45 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
  46 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
  47 code like this:
  48
  49 <blockquote><pre>
  50 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
  51 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
  52 $cmd
  53 </pre></blockquote>
  54
  55 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
  56 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
  57 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
  58 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
  59 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
  60 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
  61 installation.</p>
  62
  63 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
  64 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
  65 like this.</p>
  66 </div>
  67
  68       <div class="tags">Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.</div>
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