Pacman

Historical bug tracker for the Pacman package manager.

The pacman bug tracker has moved to gitlab:
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman/-/issues

This tracker remains open for interaction with historical bugs during the transition period. Any new bugs reports will be closed without further action.
Tasklist

FS#11913 - Pacman: package backup feature

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Erwin Van de Velde (evdvelde) - Tuesday, 28 October 2008, 15:28 GMT
Last edited by Allan McRae (Allan) - Sunday, 22 April 2012, 11:57 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Packages: Core
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version None
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 1
Private No

Details

Description:
It would be nice if one could make a backup of an installed package, i.e. make a package file of the installed package. This is useful if you want to backup a package installed on your system that has already been updated in the repositories (e.g. backing up important package before updating it). You could of course keep package files for all installed packages, but that requires a lot of disk space. Another nice side effect would be that you end up with the altered configuration files in the backup package, so reinstalling/reverting is really easy.

This task depends upon

Closed by  Allan McRae (Allan)
Sunday, 22 April 2012, 11:57 GMT
Reason for closing:  Won't implement
Additional comments about closing:  Simple bash script around provided tools will work.
Comment by Allan McRae (Allan) - Tuesday, 28 October 2008, 15:35 GMT
Look at the bacman script in the pacman-contrib package
Comment by Erwin Van de Velde (evdvelde) - Monday, 03 November 2008, 19:42 GMT
This is not sufficient for convenient use in the following use case: backing up all packages that are about to be updated. This can be useful for people who do not want to keep all installed packages in /var/pacman/pkg but want to have backups of known-good versions when updates arrive, these files can be removed after a couple of hours/days, reducing the used disk space.

I do not think a user needs to join a devel mailing list, nor write patches for a feature request.

I tried to discuss about it on IRC (#archlinux-pacman), but to no avail. Since here is the choice for feature requests, I ask it to be discussed in detail here.

Returning to the request: the implementation is minor (in fact, you almost have it already available as you pointed it out) and is useful, I am sure, not only for me.

So it would be nice if you discussed about it instead of slamming this request shut every time.
Comment by Aaron Griffin (phrakture) - Monday, 03 November 2008, 19:45 GMT
Re-opening. In the future do NOT abuse the bug tracker. You give me more work to do and thus less real work gets done. If no one else cares about this feature but you the ONLY way it will get integrated is if you provide a patch, or you send someone money to take time out of their day to fix your problem.

Comment by Allan McRae (Allan) - Tuesday, 04 November 2008, 00:28 GMT
If someone really wants to implement this, a bash script would be fairly easy:

pacman -Sy
pacman -Qu -> parse output
bacman
pacman -Su
Comment by Dan McGee (toofishes) - Tuesday, 04 November 2008, 04:49 GMT
We aren't paid around here- we're volunteers and we work on the stuff that interests us. This *will* sit idle until someone cares enough to write a patch to change it, and it appears neither Allan or I have reached that point.
Comment by Allan McRae (Allan) - Sunday, 22 April 2012, 11:57 GMT
Working bash script:

pacman -Sy
pkgs="$(pacman -Sup --print-format %n | sed "1d")"
for i in pkgs; do bacman $i; done
pacman -Su

Could be made more robust if anyone actually wanted to use it... (not by me!)

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