aptitude's default caching behavior
Hello:
By default, aptitude keeps everything it downloads in /var/cache/apt/archive. I had 43 versions of zsh, taking up 87M! Before invoking the Clean Cache action in aptitude, df -h gave me this:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 28G 17G 9.7G 63% /
After cleaning the cache, df -h returned this:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 28G 6.4G 20G 25% /
Obviously, I hadn't ever cleaned out the cache! (I was unaware of the default behavior.) The default behavior seems to me to be ill-advised, but, in any event, it can be changed, by going to Options, Miscellaneous and checking the box to remove obsolete packages after downloading new package lists. Then, presumably, aptitude will keep only current packages in the archive.
I hope this information will be of use to someone else (but maybe I was just ignorant!).
Patrick
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