do-release-upgrade seems not to check if there is enough HD space for the upgrade

[Guntbert Reiter]

Binary package hint: update-manager-core

on upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 on a small system (8 GB HD, ~1GB free) the remaining space on the HD dropped to 48MB. Downloads occur before deletes :-)). I would have expected a warning before the downloads begin.

[Walter Garcia-Fontes (walter-garcia)]

Sorry that the issue got unattended for a long time. Please feel free to reopen by marking the status as "new" if you see this in current versions of update-manager.

[Guntbert Reiter (guntbert)]

it is a bit difficult to create a test environment "on the fly" :-)
I was hoping that someone would look into update-manager if there is a space check at all

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

There is space check in DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeCache.py however it is rather complicated estimating the amount of space packages will take after they are installed so it may have gone awry.

It'd be useful to see the log files from your upgrade, which you can find in /var/log/dist-upgrade as the calculation is also dependent on how you've structured your file system and partitions.

[Guntbert Reiter (guntbert)]

I can appreciate the usefulness of log files but the VM in question was ditched long ago - sorry.

But my problem was NOT the final size after the upgrade. It was the downloading of the "new" packages altogether which brought the system near to desaster - before the actual upgrade took place. And this requirement should be a little easier to check (I hope :-))

[Walter Garcia-Fontes (walter-garcia)]

I'm duplicating this bug to bug 876146 , where problems that can make an unusable system after an upgrade are being dealt with. I agree that that user should be warned if there is less than some given space (less than 1 GiB?) of space in the root system when an upgrade to a new release is attempted. Ubuntu automatically warns when there is 1 GiB in the root partition, but it may be too late to stop the upgrade when the automatic warning arrives.