What is /var/apt/cache good for ? (and other Sid dist-upgrade riddles)
Hi,
i ran
apt-get update
apt-get dist-ugrade
on my Sid VM, one year after the last such run.
It announced to need 1.2 GB more of disk space, which is astounding on its own,
but in the end it consumed 2.4 GB.
When looking for the reason of the waste i got to nearly 5 GB of
/var/cache/apt
Before i run apt-get commands from the web like "clean" or "autoclean",
i'd like to know for what use case Debian keeps this wealth of .deb files.
The internet mainly has the story that it grows a lot, for the purpose
of re-installing installed packages. Is that a valid use case ?
On my Jessie it is 2.4 GB. But she has 2.5 TB of disk, not 32 GB like Sid.
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Further i could need hints how to find out why dist-upgrade intentionally
inflated the installed Sid by 1.2 GB of installed package content.
What in a Sid of less than 10 GB useful size can grow that much during a
single year ?
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Riddle about find test -ctime:
find /var/cache -ctime 1 -exec ls -l '{}' ';'
finds nothing rather than the files which were created or chmodded since
yesterday, whereas
ls -ltcR /var/cache 2>&1 | grep 'Sep 15'
finds 1811 files of 1.2 GB total size.
find -mtime seems to work, but is not what i would need for finding new
files installed by apt-get.
On Sid it does not work with self-made files in $HOME either.
On my Jessie, find -ctime seems to work ok.
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Have a nice day :)
Thomas
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