A better scheme would be to explicitly retain the last N compiled versions of each package (where N is configurable) regardless of their version numbers; that would fix all these problems, probably allow nuking pkg_tarup, and make undo-replace much more robust. However, it would require rearranging a lot of things (including e.g. the layout of the binary package tree) and is therefore not trivial. While I don't object to a retain-recent-N notion, I don't see how that leads to "no one needs pkg_tarup". pkg_tarup is a useful tool for some circumstances, and the default behavior being to retain packages going forward is a long way from "no one will even need pkg_tarup". Whether pkg_tarup's functionality should be part of pkg_create vs separate is another issue; to me the important thing is that it exist.
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