Imagine a very simplified apt archive with just 4 packages in it eg.
chrome4
chrome3
chrome2
chrome1
They are not real packages just simplified examples. Chrome4 is the newest and Chrome1 is the oldest.
If I run apt-get clean they all disappear - great for saving space, but not much use if you want to reinstall anything.
If I run apt-get autoclean I am just left with chrome4 since the other three are no longer in the package repository and therefore can't be downloaded any more and therefore are removed - fine for space saving and also for saving on downloads IF you want to reinstall chrome4, but what if chrome4 doesn't work for you and you want to go back to chrome3? You have got to resort to searching for old packages in an online package repository.
The kind of archive cleaning that makes sense to me would be one that either saved both the present version and the previous version or, perhaps better still, just saved the previous version, because saving the present version is not really necessary unless you are bandwidth restricted, because it is easily downloaded again from the package manager.
If I just kept chrome3 in my archive and chrome4 turns out to be a disaster, I can easily reinstall version 3 but without consuming too much disk space. That is the kind of archive management that would make sense to me.
I know I could do it manually, but that would be a huge chore, so does anything exist that would do that automatically?
Hope that makes sense btw
