[pacman-dev] issues with cleaning a shared pacman cache with new -Sc behaviour

[Xavier]

fancris3 wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:43:29 -0000, Roman Kyrylych
> <roman.kyrylych at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> Hi!
>>
>> I've found an issue that appeared after the change in -Sc behaviour.
>> It now removes "uninstalled" packages from cache which is good for
>> majority of users, but is bad for shared pacman cache users.
>> With a pacman cache shared between machines it is impossible to
>> correctly clean it with pacman if a set of installed packages on them
>> is different.
>> I remember there was at least one script posted here or on forums that
>> removes old version of packages from a specified directory
>> (it was provided as a helpful tool for managing local repositories
>> AFAIR), but I cannot find it.
>> Could someone who have this (or similar) script please share it?
>> It needs to be posted to our wiki page about a shared cache, and maybe
>> Phil's rucksack script needs to be modified as well.
>>
>
>
> http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=29555  ?
>

Ahah, that's funny. When pacman removed the old versions from the cache, 
people wanted to remove the no longer installed versions.
And now that pacman removes the no longer installed versions, people 
want to remove the old versions from the cache.

But there is indeed a problem here. For a not shared cache, the new 
behavior makes more sense. But for a shared cache, the old behavior was 
better.
So in that thread, all the first scripts should emulate the new 3.1 
behavior (and so should be unneeded now), but maybe the last script 
there from Spider emulates the old 3.0 behavior?

In any cases, it doesn't seem possible to satisfy everyone. So it might 
be better to use external scripts for that indeed..