[vox-tech] Do Apt GUI's Clean?

[Chanoch (Ken) Bloom]

On Thu, 2011-03-24 at 21:33 -0700, Bob Scofield wrote:
> There have been GUI's for apt such as Adept, Synaptic, and now there 
> are "update managers."  I haven't used them very much.  I use aptitude.  
> Aptitude and Apt-Get have the "clean" and "autoclean" commands.

Just to be clear, we're talking about cleaning out the package cache of
packages that you've downloaded but possibly not yet installed.

> While I have not seen autoclean do much for the last couple of years,

Autoclean deletes packages that are no longer available for download
since there's no way that the apt-get package list will ask to install
themn, but keeps around packages that are still in the package list in
case you decide to uninstall and reinstall them for some reason.

> clean 
> really makes room.  After a recent install my system went from being 38% full 
> to being 30% full after executing clean.
> 
> Do the apt GUI's have a clean feature?  If not, it would seem to me that those 
> who use them should occasionally use the command line to clean their systems.  
> Is that right?

In synaptic, it's "Settings > Preferences > Files > Clear cache" (I
don't use synaptic myself, so that's all according to this article from
2009 http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/ubuntu-clean-aptitude-cache/ )

I'm sure the others do too.

It's not automatic, because people have reasons for wanting to keep the
cache around. For example, most recently-installed Debian systems  have
a cron job to download the lastest updates in the background. Where are
those updates stored until they're installed? The package cache.

> On I side note, some years ago Karsten Self did some posts here on why 
> aptitude was better than apt.  I notice that aptitude does not come on the 
> initial installs of the most recent version of Ubuntu and Kabuntu.  You have 
> to use apt-get to get aptitude.  I thought this strange.