For ever now some friends and I have been talking about making essential packages, which would pull in all the tools that we often use on Debian. So here goes…

With the power of the equivs package, this is actually a very short procedure.

Using the ept-cache utility advertised on joey’s blog I was able to have a look at some packages on my site that are likely not on your system.

To get packages of inverse popularity which you have installed run:

    ept-cache search -t clean -s t- | less

Of interest are the following.