mjhjmtu

I'm reading a tutorial on backing up packages from one Ubuntu/Debian server and restoring to another (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/ubuntu-and-debian-package-management-essentials#transferring-package-lists-between-systems) that uses dselect as part of the process.

However, wherever I look online everyone seems to say that dselect is deprecated and apt should be used instead, but I'm not sure what the apt equivalent of sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade is.

Is it really just sudo apt-get upgrade? Would I just do:

sudo dpkg --set-selections < packagelist.txt

and then

sudo apt-get upgrade ? Or is there some extra nuance with dselect-upgrade that requires a different apt command to be used to acheive the same results?

apt-get dselect-upgrade doesn’t actually use dselect, it applies changes made to the Status field in the list of available packages. This is what dselect used to do (and still does), but it’s also what dpkg --set-selections does — so the instructions you’re following are just using the old interface between dselect and apt-get to get apt-get to apply changes made by dpkg.

The process goes like this:

• 
  dpkg --set-selections updates the package statuses in the list of available packages (stored in /var/lib/dpkg/status, based on the available packages in /var/lib/dpkg/available), but doesn’t perform any package installations;


• 
  apt-get dselect-upgrade resolves the delta between the currently-installed packages and the states requested in the list of available packages, and performs the necessary actions to reconcile the two.

No dselect involved!