Package: debspawn
Version: 0.5.0-1
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

thanks for fixing all of the bugs I reported. I was looking into
debspawn again and noticed that there is no way to opt out of caching
downloaded .debs locally. One can cache the directory for caching them,
but not disable it.

Why would one want to do that? If your system resides on a SSD, writes
reduce the lifetime of your disk. Partially, one can avoid writes
incurred by debspawn by mounting a tmpfs on /var/tmp/debspawn (or moving
it to a tmpfs-based /tmp). The writes to the aptcache cannot be avoided
that way. My local network has a fast mirror, so downloading them over
and over again is not too bad. Quite to the contrary, the cache can be
shared by multiple hosts.

One relatively simple way I see here is to reserve a special value for
the APTCacheDir setting for disabling the cache. It seems like toml
doesn't have any equivalent to None or null and the suggestion is to
skip the field in such a case. Unfortunately, that case already has the
semantics of using the default value. Since all valid values of
APTCacheDir should start with a slash, maybe "disabled" works?

Helmut

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