I get that, but what I am arguing is that it is actually better to just get rid of it completely. Even on SD cards, disk space is no longer the consideration it once was. The points are:
1) There will always be a point at which you wish you'd had the entire history and, Oopsie!, it just deleted the oldest ones. Whether that number is 12, 24, 36 or 1000.
2) Having it spread over multiple files is a pain-in-the-... and having them gzipped is also so. Far better to just have it all in one, big, uncompressed file.
3) It had occurred to me that it is possible that some future system upgrade may re-install that file - since the file (/etc/logrotate.d/apt) does "belong" to the system. It would be within its rights for some future upgrade to re-create the file. I may have to keep an eye on it. BTW, one solution might be to (rather than outright removing it) make the file zero length and immutable (with "chattr"). I wonder what impact that would have. Does anyone know what happens if apt tries to install a file and it fails (for some reason, including it having been made immutable) ? Does it blow up or does it recover gracefully and move on?
1) There will always be a point at which you wish you'd had the entire history and, Oopsie!, it just deleted the oldest ones. Whether that number is 12, 24, 36 or 1000.
2) Having it spread over multiple files is a pain-in-the-... and having them gzipped is also so. Far better to just have it all in one, big, uncompressed file.
3) It had occurred to me that it is possible that some future system upgrade may re-install that file - since the file (/etc/logrotate.d/apt) does "belong" to the system. It would be within its rights for some future upgrade to re-create the file. I may have to keep an eye on it. BTW, one solution might be to (rather than outright removing it) make the file zero length and immutable (with "chattr"). I wonder what impact that would have. Does anyone know what happens if apt tries to install a file and it fails (for some reason, including it having been made immutable) ? Does it blow up or does it recover gracefully and move on?
Statistics: Posted by BigRedMailbox — Sat Jan 24, 2026 4:52 am