Re: Proposal: A new approach to differential debs

[Christian Seiler <christian@iwakd.de>]

(Setting reply-to to debian-devel@ only as I don't think this
should continue on debian-dpkg@ and deity@)

On 08/14/2017 12:29 AM, Marvin Renich wrote:
> * Christian Seiler <christian@iwakd.de> [170813 13:19]:
>> On 08/13/2017 07:11 PM, Peter Silva wrote:
>>>> apt by default automatically deletes packages files after a successful install,
>>>
>>> I don't think it does that.
>>
>> The "apt" command line tool doesn't, but traditional "apt-get" does, as
>> does "aptitude". This was documented in the release notes of Jessie and
>> the changelog of the APT package when the "apt" wrapper was introduced.
> 
> This differs from my experience.  My laptop's /var/cache/apt/archives/
> directory has 3459 .deb files.  I use aptitude almost exclusively, and I
> update several times a week.

Erm, rereading my text, I misspoke a bit, I meant the opposite of
what I said:

 - apt-get / aptitude leave /var/cache/apt/archives lying around
 - apt doesn't

> Is there an apt.conf parameter that controls this?

For aptitude I have no idea, haven't used that in quite a while.

For the apt and apt-get utilities there's the following explanation
in /usr/share/doc/apt/NEWS.Debian.gz:

  [ Automatic removal of debs after install ]
  After packages are successfully installed by apt(8),
  the corresponding .deb package files will be
  removed from the /var/cache/apt/archives cache directory.

  This can be changed by setting the apt configuration option
    "Binary::apt::APT::Keep-Downloaded-Packages" to "true". E.g:

  # echo 'Binary::apt::APT::Keep-Downloaded-Packages "true";' \
      > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01keep-debs

  Please note that the behavior of apt-get is unchanged. The
  downloaded debs will be kept in the cache directory after they
  are installed. To enable the behavior for other tools, you can set
  "APT::Keep-Downloaded-Packages" to false.

The corresponding changelog entry for 1.2~exp1 is not quite as
obvious, so I should have probably referenced NEWS and not
changelog in my message, sorry about that:

  * Add new APT::Keep-Downloaded-Packages option (Closes: #160743)

> A cursory glance through the Jessie release notes
> (HTML) TOC doesn't give any obvious pointer to where this was mentioned;

Sorry, I was pretty sure it was in there, but after looking
through them you're right: it's not in there. But it was
mentioned by the APT developers towards the end of the
Jessie release cycle - I can't find anyting in
debian-devel-announce about that either though. Maybe it was
in the DebConf15 talk about APT?

Regards,
Christian