Does the project send "purge" commands for application binaries?
10 Jan 2016 16:45:55 UTC
Topic 198369
(moderation:
AFAIR, the project sends purge commands once in a while to clean the local clients from project data which is no longer needed. However, this doesn't seem to be the case for the binaries: I just looked into and found a bunch of different old application versions, which are obsolete for sure.
If that's really something which is not maintained by the project, I'd do that by myself.
Just wanted to be sure about that.
Om mani padme hum.
Does the project send "purge" commands for application binaries?
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Old binaries are removed by the project at some point. I don't know when that happens - perhaps when the Devs get prompted into thinking about it.
If you are considering deleting them, just be aware that BOINC will notice and will simply download fresh copies. To do it without that happening, you would need to stop BOINC and edit the state file to remove the entries that cause BOINC to think that those old files are still required.
A safer course of action is to wait until the Devs see your request and perhaps tell you what the plan is for cleaning up old apps. I'm sure you'll get a response in due course.
Cheers,
Gary.
Thank you for this
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Thank you for this information, Gray!
So I'll just wait until the files will be removed.
Om mani padme hum.
I am not aware of a way for
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I am not aware of a way for the project to purge old application binaries from the clients; just data files. This is a flaw in BOINC. These files will get purged when you reset the project or re-install the BOINC client, but that's probably not what you want to do.
We could try to treat these as data files and send out "delete requests", but I'm not sure whether this will work.
BM
BM
RE: I am not aware of a way
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Wow! - seems like a pretty glaring omission. I've not really paid any attention to what happens to old binaries. I just assumed there would be a mechanism for removing them. I just looked at a host of mine and there are quite a few old apps hanging around :-). The space occupied is relatively small, despite the number, so not much of an issue, even for small 20GB drives, as many of mine are :-).
In the distant past, I have cleaned old apps from a BOINC installation by editing the state file. As I remember it, each version of an app is described in two places - a ... block and an ... block. I seem to remember the blocks used to be blocks in older versions of BOINC. I guess there was a change at some point - perhaps with version 7. All I used to do was stop BOINC and remove the two particular blocks that were associated with the particular application I wished to remove. I would then restart BOINC, after which, the particular binary file could be deleted without BOINC wanting to fetch it again.
Cheers,
Gary.
There currently is not such a
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There currently is not such a feature. But there is a feature request logged: Client: remove files from deprecated apps