I noticed a paragraph under the section “Freeing some disk space”, which states:
When updating, old packages are kept in directories named “state_…” in /system/packages/administrative/ to allow booting with previous states in case update fails. After a while you might want to free up some disk space. You can safely remove the oldest state folders there, as well as the “transaction-…” ones. Do not touch the other directories though.
Keeping the above in mind, someone could possibly make a simple “Disk Cleaner” app for Haiku, that would search the abovementioned directories and ask the user whether they would like to free up this disk space.
THIS is an OLD ‘mistake’ in haiku, so I read here in the forum…
apparently there are quite a few of them ~ some for (+/-) 10 years or so…
I’m ‘only’ an uninformed person, but should (known) bugs not be fixed, along with new implementations ?
Yes, but we are a very small team and there is only so much we can work on at the same time. This one isn’t particularly annoying (personally I know where to go when my system partition is full to make some space, and it doesn’t happen very often), so people have focused on other things that seem more important.
Of course if we had a team of full-time developers, things would happen faster, but there are times (especially after releases) where there are more new bugs found and reported, than bugs solved in Haiku.
It’s a bit difficult because this is all volunteer work. It’s hard to advertise for “hey, come work unpaid on that obscure operating system you probably never heard of!” to outsiders.
So I think we need a more complex process of more users -> more application developers -> more people hitting bugs while using Haiku or trying to get apps to work -> they eventually start to look into the OS sourcecode and send us patches to fix the problems -> they become Haiku developers
But then again, starting this process with a relatively young OS, still in beta phase and with many bugs, can be a bit difficult as well.
FilWip could be the best choice if it had some granularity. If I understand the program, it is an all or nothing approach to removing ‘previous system state’. If selected, all previous system states will be wiped.
The easiest thing is to open the directory and delete some old states yourself. This gives you more control than any tool could. After all, you are the one who may remember which of these states are “big changes” and worth keeping (major update of the whole system, installing/removing a large app) and which are “small changes” (just added a little tool that was missing) and not that important to keep.
I’m not convinced that an extra tool (with an extra UI to learn and behavior to control) is very helpful here. Either we had some kind of automatic, invisible thing that cleans up old states, or Tracker is fine. I think an internediate solution, where there is a specific tool, but you must still control it manually, is “worst of both worlds”?
