package update proceeds without adequate disk space

[Christopher Barrington-Leigh]

Binary package hint: apt

I ran "apt-get dist-upgrade" for a big upgrade. The apt checked to see whether I had enough disk space to download all the files (ie I didn't at first, and it refused to upgrade. I made more space). But that is inadequate space, as there needs to be enough both to download the files and to install them! So the installer crashed in a horrible way when the disk ran out of space, and messed up my distribution.

The installer should refuse to install new packages if there is not adequate space on the disk for them!

[Christopher Barrington-Leigh (cpbl)]

I was using Feisty's latest version of apt, by the way.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

This seems to be pretty common, a lot of false positives because a system partition is filled during package upgrade, usually due to the kernel.

[Kosta (kosta-fillibach)]

im using hardy. theres a lot of kernel upates and /boot is pretty small. I have to delete old kernels all the time because the update tries to install a new one without taking care of disk space...

[Dereck Wonnacott (dereck)]

This will not solve Kosta's problem, but apt-get will now take into consideration that it must download the packages before it can install them when calculating the space requirements.

[Dereck Wonnacott (dereck)]

This is a difficult problem.

The package information only tells us how big the installed fileset is. We also know the package size before installation. We do not truely know where a package will put files until the installer runs.

If the user uses a custom partitioning scheme such as yourself, we need to open ever package, extract where files are to be placed, sum the file size for ever one of the 100's of packages to upgrade. Then make the desicion on whether it will fit or not.

In addition to that challenge, some packages download more data after installation, think flash and mscorefonts. The only way to be sure those package would fit is to install them and see if the data will fit.

I think this is reason enough for 'wont fix' seeing that anything that we do will make the already painfully long install process longer. It works with the default and recommended disk configuration of a single / partition. If a user changes the disk configuration he should now know the consequences.