Cydia should provide a less aggressive clean option

[andreev2001]

The available space is limited on the phone. Now downloaded packages (*.deb files under /var/cache/apt/archive) are not deleted after Cydia exits. The installation process here is performed at one step /download and installation are combined/ so we should not leave unnecessary files. The user doesn’t have option to clean the cache from Cydia and not everyone knows how to use apt-get.

[saurik]

I think this should be an option, defaulted to "on" (as most users seem to want this feature). Personally, I would hate to have Cydia clean my quite valuable cache ;P. Just to be clear: what this ticket is really requesting is "don't cache anything". Software would get downloaded, installed, and then immediately deleted. That's fine, but should be an option ;P. (Personally, I --reinstall packages a lot, and like my cache.)

Personally, by the way, I don't consider an 8GB device (and my 8GB iPhone is even on the small side now) even remotely limited. Maybe it's just having grown up with 5 1/4" floppy diskettes and 20MB disk drives, but the idea that people are incredibly concerned about a couple hundred meg of space on their iPhone/iPod weirds me out ;P.

[saurik]

In case that wasn't obvious: by "default to on" I mean "default to no cache". So the files would get deleted immediately.

[Lazarus Long]

Maybe invoking 'apt-get autoclean' at Cydia startup by default and honoring the 'DSelect::Clean' APT option could be a solution that will please everybody. The former removes packages that aren't available anymore in the repositories and the later gives the flexibility to always clean, prompt, auto clean, pre-auto clean (maybe not applicable since Cydia is a "get and install" manager) or never clean the cache.

[saurik]

Ok, I now do a rather aggressive clean on close. For fully downloaded files it is a clean, and for partially downloaded files it is an autoclean. This is too aggressive, though: I've changed the details.