Errata

There was a discussion today on the LUV-main mailing list about apache virtual hosting. Someone suggested mod_vhost_alias which is OK for a simple solution, but pretty limited.

IMO, there are much better ways of doing it. Specifically, generating config fragments for each virtual host.

I wrote such a system years ago, and have always thought “I should package it up for debian”. There’s a moderate amount of work involved in doing so, and probably an even larger amount of support work afterwards. Worst of all, I’d have to write – or con someone else into writing – documentation for it (it’s easy enough to use that you can be SHOWN how to use it in 10 minutes, but that isn’t good enough for a distributed package).

I guess the point of this blog post is to find out if there’s sufficient interest to make it worth the effort. Feel free to comment or email me about it.

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In this post, Steven Hanley wonders how to keep /var/cache/apt/archives empty on a machine that has a full mirror of debian on it.

That’s actually the wrong question.

The right question is ‘Why is /var/cache/apt/archives even relevant on a machine with a full mirror of debian?’

/etc/apt/sources.list has always supported file:/ URLs. for example, sources.list on my local debian mirror looks like this:

deb file:/home/ftp/debian unstable main contrib non-free
deb file:/home/ftp/debian-multimedia/ unstable main

With a file URL, apt-get doesn’t need to download any packages, and thus doesn’t need to cache anything in /var/cache/apt/archives. No need to keep it empty, it just is empty.

In a related post, Andrew Pollock suggests adding DPkg::Post-Invoke { “apt-get clean”; }; to /etc/apt/apt.conf.

That would be fine if you ONLY ever ran “apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade”.

It’s not fine if you run “apt-get -d” to download packages first, then install a few packages with “apt-get install package”, and then run “apt-get dist-upgrade”.

If you try that, then the DPKG::Post-Invoke rule will clean out /var/cache/apt/archives when you install the individual package(s). When you then run the dist-upgrade, apt-get will have to download all the packages again.

Better just to get into the habit of running apt-get clean or autoclean occasionally when you want to reclaim some disk space.