apt-mark showmanual lists a lot of packages for me:
root@hcompneu:~# apt-mark showmanual | wc -l
4013
root@hcompneu:~# apt-mark showmanual | head
a11y-profile-manager-indicator
abiword
abiword-common
abiword-plugin-grammar
account-plugin-facebook
account-plugin-flickr
account-plugin-google
account-plugin-identica
account-plugin-twitter
accountsservice
root@hcompneu:~# apt-mark showmanual | tail
yelp-xsl
zeitgeist
zeitgeist-core
zeitgeist-datahub
zenity
zenity-common
zip
zlib1g
zlib1g-dev
zlib1g:i386
As I understand, it should only list those packages which I manually installed. I don't remember in each case anymore but I'm pretty sure I did not install all of those manually. Actually, I rarely installed any software on this system, despite Chrome, OpenOffice and some other very basic things. So I would expect a list of maybe 10-100 packages but not more. Maybe it also includes ubuntu-desktop, grub and linux or so from the base Ubuntu installation.
Maybe in the past though I wrote some scripts to fix up a broken system by automatically calling apt-get install XXX on various packages. Or maybe I did other things. I don't really remember anymore.
Could that be the case here? So I somehow messed it up? If that is the case, what would you suggest? Mark all to automatically installed, and then by hand add some selected packages like ubuntu-desktop?
Or is such output correct and I understand it wrongly? I read this and I'm not sure. It looks like it is much more complicated to get the list of manually installed packages? Or why is the answer so complicated?
Or is apt-mark showmanual buggy?
root@hcompneu:~# ls -ld /var/log/installer/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 27 11:27 /var/log/installer/
root@hcompneu:~# grep -r cdrom /etc/apt/ --include=*.list
root@hcompneu:~# dpkg -l | grep ^ii | wc -l
3812
