Bug#160743: I want a very different autoclean feature

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

sacrificial-spam-address@horizon.com writes:

>> To put in my 2c I would forgo the time limit.
>> 
>> Keep every available, installed and the previously installed version.
>
> I thought about that, but it's sometimes not the right thing; I've
> seen problems with a major new upstream release lead to a flurry of
> .deb releases, but I end up needing to revert to the old version.
> (I seem to remember this happening with samba a while ago.)

So you update, it fails, you downgrade to the previously installed
version.

Previously installed, not just previous version. It should keep the
installed and the last working version in cache.

> Even if it's pilot error and I just haven't forward-ported the local
> configuration properly to the new config file syntax, I can still need
> to revert to get it working NOW, damn it.
>
> On the other hand, I probably don't need the before-previous release of
> an infrequently-released package.  (E.g. filters 2.46, which I installed
> October '08.)
>
>> This can be hacked together with a Dpkg::Post-Invoke method that creates
>> a Packages file listing the respective versions and "deb file:///path
>> ./" in sources.list. But it's certainly not a clean solution.
>
> Thanks for the hint; I might try something like that.  I can keep a series
> of such files and roll them over in cron.weekly or some such.
>
> But while that will make "apt-get autoclean" do the right thing, it's
> still very easy to accidentally invoke "apt-get clean" via various
> front-ends.  Especially if you bounce back and forth between machines
> with different package retention policies.  It would still be nice to
> have a built-in feature to disable that.

The alternative is to create a local mirror with reprepro. You can make
a nightly snapshot or make a snapshot every time you apt-get
upgrade/install (unless there already is one). A cron job can then
remove the snapshot after 2 weeks.

All just a workaround but maybe it helps you over the time till someone
implements a configurable policy framework for apt-get (auto)clean.

MfG
        Goswin