Necessary disk space to free keeps increasing

[Lilian ROBERT]

I am running Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 on a IBM Thinkpad T40p.

I started the upgrade to gutsy beta with the command
update-manager -d

In the step "Modification des dépôts logiciels en cours" (sorry I am in French. Its the second step), after the confirmation message for disabling some repositories, after the confirmation message informing about the packages that are not supported anymore by Ubuntu), the following error messages appears :
===============================
Espace disponible sur le disque insuffisant

Abandon de la mise à niveau. la mise à niveau nécessite une quantité totale d'espace libre de 1769M sur le disque « / ». Veuillez libérer au moins 396M d'espace disque supplémentaire sur « / ». Videz la corbeille et supprimez les paquets temporaires des installations précédentes en utilisant la commande « sudo apt-get clean ».
===============================

The first time I tried, the message was talking about 1100M of disc space required. I freed some disc space and retried. But that didn't work and then, each times I try, each times I free disc space and each times the message tells me that more space is required. Now, I have 1200M free in / and I don't know what I could delete...

How could I upgrade ?

[unggnu (unggnu)]

Maybe it doesn't calculate the temporary disk space or it just reports the wrong one. Couldn't you change your partition size with gparted on the live cd?

[Marco Rodrigues (gothicx)]

Please attach files /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log and /var/log/dist-upgrade/apt.log to see if there is a bug.

Thanks!

[Lilian ROBERT (lilian-robert)]

After a lot of packages uninstall, I could start de upgrade. It is now working.

See the files you requested in attachment.

Thank you

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

Looking at the log it seems like update-manager was correct about the space requirements. It take a bit of space in /, /var/cache etc to do a upgrade. Or is there anything particular that makes you suspicious that there is a real bug here?

[Lilian ROBERT (lilian-robert)]

I think it is a bug because of the required disc space indicated by update-manager. The first time, it tells me 1100M, the second time 1230M and each times I tried, after I freed some space, it gives me a different number, each time bigger.

In my mind, if update-manager tells me that 1100M of free space is required, if I delete logs and uninstall packages to free the required space, the next time the upgrade should work.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for this additional explaination.

I misread it at first. The size required should indeed always be the same. If it reports different (and rising) numbers, than that is a bug. How did you delete stuff? By removing packages via apt/synaptic? Or by freeing some other space?

Thanks,
 Michael

[Martin Sander (forke)]

Confirmed.

Workarounds:
a) resize the partition containing /, or /var/ or /usr.
or
b) mv /var/cache/apt to a different partion and make a symlink to it
or
c) mv /var/cache/apt to a different partition and edit
/etc/apt/apt.conf
with the following line:
Dir::Cache::archives "/path/to/your/archive/dir";
(see #106804)

I have a (possible) explanation why different sizes to be freed are shown.
from main.log:

2007-10-14 13:10:54,205 DEBUG dir '/var/cache/apt/archives' needs '888777698.0' of '<DistUpgradeControler.FreeSpace object at 0xa7a99ac>' (1975717888.000000)
2007-10-14 13:10:54,206 DEBUG dir '/usr' needs '658960384.0' of '<DistUpgradeControler.FreeSpace object at 0xa7a99ac>' (1086940190.000000)
2007-10-14 13:10:54,206 DEBUG dir '/usr' needs '52428800' of '<DistUpgradeControler.FreeSpace object at 0xa7a99ac>' (427979806.000000)
2007-10-14 13:10:54,206 DEBUG dir '/boot' needs '62914560' of '<DistUpgradeControler.FreeSpace object at 0xa7a99ac>' (375551006.000000)

The upgrade-manager first checks if there is enough space to download the packages to /var/cache/apt/archives. If it encounters an error here, it aborts and reports how much space is missing. If you free some space, it succeeds in this step, but fails in the next one, when it checks for space to install the packages.

If you consider this behavior a bug the installer should not directly abort after encountering that there is too little space, but go on calculating and display the total result. Or the text should be changend saying "You have to free AT LEAST foo MB of space" ...

I had a quick look at the sources, maybe I'll try to write a patch.

[Lilian ROBERT (lilian-robert)]

Thanks a lot ! I think I will have the opportunity to try your workarounds when I do other upgrades.

Best regards
Lilian

[Lilian ROBERT (lilian-robert)]

It's strange... I am trying to upgrade my professional computer. I moved /var/cache/apt to /home which is on a different partition and has 2.0G of free space.

But the error message is the same and the space it is telling me to free match the difference between the space needed and the free space of my / partition...

[David Eradi (milchmann)]

i can confirm the bug. first time it told me i need ~1200 MB free space and i freed up 1400 MB. next time the update required 1800 MB. and i cannot free up that much right now, so I will download & burn the cd and try an install from cd.

[garf (gareth20)]

Thanks for your help with this. I was running into the exact same error and workaround (c) worked perfectly to resolve it.

[Pablo Castellano (pablocastellano)]

Marking as confirmed again as for previous comments.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

raising from confirmed to triaged. This is still a problem when upgrading from Intrepid to Jaunty