> Some packages will stay the same for years, but in the past week
> I can see four occasions when changes in list contents have occurred
> on oldstable. So there's little similarity.
The question is not really whether "apt/lists" is similar to
"apt/archives", but whether the content of "apt/lists" is appropriate
for `/var/cache`.
AFAIK nothing bad will happen to your system if you delete
`/var/lib/apt/lists`. It will still run as before and you can still
install packages as before. The only thing that seems to be impacted is
that some APT operations will temporarily work in a kind of "degraded"
mode until the next `apt update`.
That seems similar to things like `locate` failing if you remove
`/var/log/plocate/plocate.db` (until that DB is rebuilt).
Stefan
