dpkg status history...how much is too much?

[montefin <montefin@finux.com>]

In the spirit of "Ignorance is the path to wisdom" please bear with me.

Discovering the ambiguities in certain file size accountings under
Unix/Linux (re: earlier post where du and ls gave vastly different
results for both /var/log/lastlog and /var/log/faillog) led me to
inspect /var more closely.

There seemed to be no ambiguity in the following:

# du -h /var/lib/dpkg
5.0M    /var/lib/dpkg/info
1.0k    /var/lib/dpkg/updates
56k     /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives
5.0k    /var/lib/dpkg/methods/disk/www
8.0k    /var/lib/dpkg/methods/disk
2.0k    /var/lib/dpkg/methods/floppy
1.0k    /var/lib/dpkg/methods/mnt
2.0k    /var/lib/dpkg/methods/multicd
2.0k    /var/lib/dpkg/methods/mountable
1.0k    /var/lib/dpkg/methods/ftp
17k     /var/lib/dpkg/methods
15M     /var/lib/dpkg

I am currently using apt-get and dpkg extensively to build and maintain
a workable Potato distro on a box with a smallish HDD (814 Mb). That 15M
in /var/lib/dpkg seemed chunky to me.

So I did du -k /var/lib/dpkg and got:

total 10762
drwxr-xr-x    6 root   root         1024 May 17 07:40 .
drwxr-xr-x   27 root   root         1024 May  7 17:51 ..
drwxr-xr-x    2 root   root         1024 May 15 22:12 alternatives
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root      3518844 May 17 03:04 available
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root      3518844 May 17 03:03 available-old
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root            8 May 17 02:47 cmethopt
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root         2128 May 17 03:02 diversions
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root         2020 May 17 03:02 diversions-old
drwxr-xr-x    2 root   root        65536 May 17 03:03 info
-rw-r-----    1 root   root            0 May 17 03:03 lock
-rw-rw----    1 root   root            0 May 17 02:47 methlock
drwxr-xr-x    8 root   root         1024 Apr  5 02:36 methods
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root         1129 Apr 13 06:19 predep-package
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root       870741 May 17 03:04 status
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root       870740 May 17 03:03 status-old
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root       870741 May 17 03:04 status.yesterday.0
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root       207236 May 15 23:59
status.yesterday.1.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root       206679 May 14 01:42
status.yesterday.2.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root       205638 May 13 20:57
status.yesterday.3.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root       205079 May  7 17:53
status.yesterday.4.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root       204288 May  7 01:03
status.yesterday.5.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 root   root       203151 May  5 13:18
status.yesterday.6.gz
drwxr-xr-x    2 root   root         1024 May 17 03:04 updates

Does dpkg need all that status history? And if not, must I monitor it
myself, or does dpkg have a self-cleansing method that is somehow not
being invoked here?

This may seem a small problem to some, but it grows in inverse
proportion to the size of ones hard disk.

I use 'apt-get clean' regularly to keep the overhead down, but I haven't
found, or knew that I'd found, anything similar in the dpkg manual page.

I hesitate to write a cron job to trim these status files on new
processes I'm still in the early stages of learning.

Thanks for whatever guidance you can give, and for your patience. 

montefin