@jmarshallnz; all your comments taken into consideration. ok to pull?

Regardless of disk space, I'd personally like to always preserve the two most recent versions per addon, to always have the ability to rollback. I'm comfortable enough that two broken releases in a row are quite unlikely.

One suggestion: if that's not done somewhere else already, use this function to delete the packages of uninstalled addons?

hmm.. i sorta agree and sorta disagree. i guess we could change the space limit to be a 'desired max', while allowing more usage to keep two archives around of all.

i was pondering using it to nuke uninstalled addons. but sometimes quick re-adding is also nice. other opinions on that around? i'm fine with going with the consensus..

Was guessing why a backup was big&slow, just figured addons/packages grew to 830MB over the time...
I'll give it a try and hope it will be merged some day :)
EDIT: Works perfectly, dropped to 166MB as expected, thanks @cptspiff

@cptspiff will this go in at any point, my macmini would love you for it.. it has years of updates :)

i have done what I am willing to do but it was rejected as can be seen from the comments here.

@cptspiff
I can't see any comments on why it couldn't be merged or am i missing something?
With the merging an small form HTPC like rpi and the android boxes this would be a very welcome addition to clean disk space

crystal p is not satisfied.

Maybe an ifdef for certain platforms? look at ATV2, lots of questions on the forum about having no space and us pointing out to clean up (it's on the wiki but still) (same goes for higher database revs on upgrade, the old ones stay behind and fill up fast on big databases, but thats off-topic)

We NEED this for Frodo. Even if it defaults to off and is turned on in advancedsettings.xml

@CrystalP, popular demand.. can be revised later.