apt-cacher-ng in yakkety lacks distkill.pl

[Harald Hetzner]

/usr/lib/apt-cacher-ng/distkill.pl is missing!

As mentioned here

https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/acng/html/maint.html#distkill

and also here

https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Lokale_Paketquellen/Apt-Cacher-ng/#Distkill

this script is needed to get rid of the DEB files of older distros for which packages should not be cached anymore.

I remember having used this script in the past, but with yakkety it seems to have vanished. Even reinstall of the apt-cacher-ng package didn't bring it back.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.10
Package: apt-cacher-ng (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.8.0-22.24-generic 4.8.0
Uname: Linux 4.8.0-22-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.3-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Wed Oct 19 21:59:58 2016
SourcePackage: apt-cacher-ng
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to yakkety on 2016-02-06 (256 days ago)

[Simon Déziel (sdeziel)]

The distkill.pl script was last shipped with Trusty's version.

[Simon Déziel (sdeziel)]

@Harald, this seems to be a bug in how upstream generates the package. Also, since this package is in Universe, it would be best if you could report it to Debian directly.

[Eduard Bloch (edi-gmx)]

I remember vaguely that it has been dropped in favor of the new deletion assistant on the expiration page (scroll down the log page after running expiration task).

[Harald Hetzner (haraldhetzner)]

Thanks Eduard!

Based on your hint, I was able to figure out what needs to be done:

1. Open http://<APT_CACHER_HOST>:3142/acng-report.html in the browser
2. Click "Start Scan and/or Expiration" button
3. Wait for the scan to finish
4. After the scan has finished, navigate to "Allocated disk space (Top 10, show more / cleanup)" at the bottom of the page and click the link "show more / cleanup"
5. Select the check boxes left to all listed release files, we want to get rid of (seems to put a lot of load on my Firefox as checking the boxes and scrolling made the browser freeze a lot)
6. At the bottom of the page, click the button "Delete selected files"
7. On the next page, click the button "Delete files"

So it is not the apt-cacher-ng package that has a bug, but the documentation on the German Ubuntu wiki that is outdated.

Unfortunately, the procedure above is not really straight forward. Even in case that you have already navigated to the apt-cacher-ng browser page. It is not really intuitive that you have to click the tiny link "show more / cleanup" in order to start making all the old distro killing happen.

[Eduard Bloch (edi-gmx)]

Right, and at least the last part can be automated. Since this is all web stuff, there could be a link on the main control page called like "Update indexes and show distro removal overview".

Actually, using a special link for this is something that should exist anyway. Because ATM the expiration thing would abort if the distro has already disappeared from the mirrors and cannot be downloaded. Having a special entry mode for cleanup purposes could bypass this, i.e. continue to the cleanup overview even if an update error happened.

I cannot reproduce the part about "Slow Firefox". My PC here is ~7 years old and the cache directory is littered with lots of stuff and still I can use it without any issue in regular FF.

https://alioth.debian.org/plugins/scmgit/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=apt-cacher-ng/apt-cacher-ng.git;a=commitdiff;h=245b9a27c569e7e229446fe808d9a1936bec7551

[Harald Hetzner (haraldhetzner)]

Thanks again Eduard, for submitting the improvement proposal to the project's todo list.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package apt-cacher-ng - 3.1-1

---------------
apt-cacher-ng (3.1-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * New upstream version
    + removed doc references to distkill.pl (closes: #877703, LP: #1635029)
    + includes fix for rare expiration failure on missing index files
      (closes: #872830)
    + fixes credential printing in logs (closes: #877135)
    + hardens default pass-through mask for bugs.debian.org (closes: #874349)
  * Portuguese translation update (by Traduz, closes: #874609)
  * Policy definition and build-deps update (no related changes)

 -- Eduard Bloch <email address hidden> Sun, 05 Nov 2017 20:55:20 +0100