/var/cache/apt/archives not clean

[Mary Gardiner]

On Sun, Feb 13, 2005, jani wrote:
> Rui Tiago Matos wrote:
> >On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 13:17:15 -0600, Jerry Haltom
> ><wasabi at larvalstage.net> wrote:
> >>How about clean really old files from the cache. Like, only keep
> >>current packages and one previous version?
> >
> >Yep, I like this one. Actually I have a little python script to do
> >just that: keep only the most current version of a given installed
> >package and delete all the previous and no longer installed ones.
> 
> Is what you guys are talking about different from what apt-get clean
> or apt-get autoclean do?

Matos's script sounds just like apt-get autoclean, but Jerry Haltom's
suggestion is different: apt-get autoclean removes any that aren't
currently available from sources in your sources list (effectively, all
out-of-date packages).  Jerry Haltom's suggest is to keep the most
recent out-of-date package too so that you can downgrade manually if the
current package has some kind of critical bug. (I know a few people who
were very pleased they hadn't run apt-get autoclean recently when they
discovered that bug 1922 had reappeared!)

-Mary