Re: dpkg reassembly of split packages, when to purge

[mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com (Bill Mitchell)]

Richard Kettlewell <richard@elmail.co.uk> writes:

> Bill Mitchell writes:
> 
> >It also seems to me that it'd not be unreasonable to clean up
> >uncompleted dpkg work on reboot, [...]
> 
> I've already suggested reasons why I think this is a bad idea.  It
> seems to me entirely likely that one would take the machine down and
> then back up again inbetween retreiving good copies of the required
> fragments.

Ian Jackson <iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk> writes:

> Now, clearly I don't want to delete the file whose name is passed to
> dpkg (either by the user or by one of dselect's method scripts or
> automatically found by dpkg when it was given the --recursive option).
> 
> The question is when to delete the copies in /var/lib/dpkg ?

Richard, either you or I have a misperception on this.  My
perception is that Ian's not proposing to delete the user's
downloaded files.  Instead, he's asking for input on how long
to keep the copies of those files which dpkg saves in /var/lib/dpkg
in anticipation of the user attempting to unpack the fragment which
would complete a fragmented package.