Infrastructure Software

In addition to a 20tb Solaris server, I also run Solaris 11 Express in a VM on my notebook for portable external ZFS storage (long story on how and why). As you might imagine, I'm interested in keeping the system virtual image (which is stored on my notebook drive) small.

After doing a pkg update which turned out to be pretty substantial, the on-disk size (within the VM not just the virtual container) grew a good deal.

So my question: Does the package manager store downloaded package files even though it doesn't need them any more? And if so, can they be safely deleted?

E.g., Debian Linux systems have "apt-get clean", which deletes the package cache. Any Solaris analogue? (I know Solaris isn't Linux. I mean I really, REALLY know! ;-)

Thanks in advance!
-Jim



+PS: In case this question gets derailed with debate about Solaris not being a suitable solution for portable external notebook-based ZFS storage, let me just completely agree! However, after about 100 hours of work (in total over a couple of years), I've developed a solution that is rock-solid, gets a reliable 20-30 MB/s throughput [not amazing but suprising given the concept], and doesn't get confused by changing device ports, IDs, etc. I push it hard every day, all day. The drives are velcro'ed to the notebook lid. Of course I first preferentially tried Linux and and Btrfs, then ZFS-FUSE, then BSD ZFS, but this is hands-down the best solution. But it wasn't easy. In fact it was really, really hard to get everything ironed out. But the only commercial alternative...doesn't exist. Yet. (But I'm working on it.)+