Feature request: Keeping only X versions of a package

[KlavsKlavsen]

We use freight for software repos - where we build ourself - and hence we get a lot of new versions.. and currently freight has no support for even removing packages from repo.. so we have manually remove files and run freight cache..

It would be nice if freight handled freight-remove - and a bonus if freight could be configured to only keep max X instances of a certain package.

[laurvas]

I am not a freight developer, but I've read it's source code. The main problem here is to compare package versions. You can do it simply on Debian host by running dpkg --compare-versions, but there are no existing tools on other systems to do that.

Freight is designed to be portable and it can't rely on debian-only utils, so it should have it's own implementation of Debian version comparison algorithm. I think it is not an easy task, especially in POSIX shell. Freight aims to be small and simple and I don't think it's worth implementing.

I can suggest you 2 solutions:

• Write your own wrapper using dpkg --compare-versions.
• Use aptly. It don't have this feature yet, but there are community scripts that allows to do exactly what you want.