Bug#160743: I want a very different autoclean feature

[sacrificial-spam-address@horizon.com]

> To put in my 2c I would forgo the time limit.
> 
> Keep every available, installed and the previously installed version.

I thought about that, but it's sometimes not the right thing; I've
seen problems with a major new upstream release lead to a flurry of
.deb releases, but I end up needing to revert to the old version.
(I seem to remember this happening with samba a while ago.)

Even if it's pilot error and I just haven't forward-ported the local
configuration properly to the new config file syntax, I can still need
to revert to get it working NOW, damn it.

On the other hand, I probably don't need the before-previous release of
an infrequently-released package.  (E.g. filters 2.46, which I installed
October '08.)

> This can be hacked together with a Dpkg::Post-Invoke method that creates
> a Packages file listing the respective versions and "deb file:///path
> ./" in sources.list. But it's certainly not a clean solution.

Thanks for the hint; I might try something like that.  I can keep a series
of such files and roll them over in cron.weekly or some such.

But while that will make "apt-get autoclean" do the right thing, it's
still very easy to accidentally invoke "apt-get clean" via various
front-ends.  Especially if you bounce back and forth between machines
with different package retention policies.  It would still be nice to
have a built-in feature to disable that.