/var/cache/apt/archives not clean

Mary Gardiner mary-sounder at puzzling.org
Sun Feb 13 16:09:51 CST 2005


On Sun, Feb 13, 2005, Rui Tiago Matos wrote:
> Yes it is. apt-get clean removes every .deb from the cache and
> autoclean removes those which are no longer retrievable (maybe because
> you deleted the sources.list repository for them? i'm not really sure
> here).

It's because they've dropped out of the repository. Eg, if you download
thingummy 0.1.2 from hoary, and later 0.1.3 is uploaded to hoary,
apt-get autoclean will delete your cached copy of thingummy 0.1.2. You
don't have to actually delete hoary from your sources.list for this to
happen, all that has to happen is that thingummy 0.1.2 disappears from
the repository.

Here's the relevant part of the apt-get man page entry:

    autoclean

    Like  clean,  autoclean clears out the local repository of retrieved
    package files. The difference is that it only removes package files
    that can no longer be downloaded, and are largely useless.

The trouble with the definition of "largely useless" here is that some
people do like to downgrade to a slightly older version when they
discover that the latest one has bugs.

-Mary



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