Shawn Walker wrote:
One thing I think we'll need to address soon is automated pruning of
older manifests. I have a system that I've been upgrading since build
86; /var/pkg/pkg is now 711M as of build 110.
My thought was that we could change the client to remove all manifests
for a package except the one that was just installed in
pkgplan:postexecute().
Comments?
First, I'm not sure this is a substantial issue for our customers who
(likely) live on the release repo. Since 86, assuming a twice yearly
release cycle, we've been through 12 years worth of upgrades (maybe a
few less cause we skipped builds, so let's call it 8?). Build 108 seems
to take 78M on disk (for the set of 700+ packages I have installed).
That said, I can't see the harm in removing the old manifests from the
new image. It would cause an increase in the amount of disk spaced used
as Danek mentioned. As one data point, I cloned my current be, mounted
it, and removed all the contents of var/pkg/pkg . This made the cloned
BE claim 5.50M of space, instead of 155.5k. In practice, if we did this
on each image-update, the hit would be less since my test removed more
than one build's worth of files.
On the other hand, it would mean that removing earlier BE's would give a
user an easy way to reduce their disk consumption since deleting the old
BE's would clear up space. But, at least on my system, old BE's take a
minute amount of disk space compared to my currently booted one (on the
order of 50M-3G compare4d to 38G for my current BE).
In summary, I don't see a reason not to do it, but I don't see it being
a big win either. Disk space is cheap, and 711M just isn't that much
space on modern systems (especially over roughly 8 or more years of
upgrades). The place I can see it being the biggest win is in severely
resource constrained applications like some kinds of appliances, since
those might have severely restricted disk space. But, I also wouldn't
expect those appliances to be living on a stream of change that changed
much, reducing the initial problem.
Just my thoughts,
Brock
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