Amount of free space needed increases

[Iain Lane]

I was helping a friend upgrade his EEEpc to Intrepid the other day, using update-manager -d from Hardy. His device is a bit space-constrained, so I remounted the apt cache directory on a 16GB flash card which should be big enough to hold it. However, we didn't have enough free space in /usr to complete the installation - update-manager said that we needed about 50MB more freeing up. I managed to find and free about 75MB of space and started the process again. Then update-manager reported that it wanted even more disk space than it did before. This carried on for a number of rounds until we gave up as the space requirement just kept increasing each time.

update-manager should be honest about the amount of free space it needs at the start if dpkg/apt allow this, or indicate that the requirement is an estimate if it's not possible to be more accurate.

[Michele Mangili (mangilimic)]

Thank you for taking the time to make Ubuntu better. Since what you submitted is not really a bug, or a problem, but rather an idea to improve Ubuntu, you are invited to post your idea in Ubuntu Brainstorm at https://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ where it can be discussed, voted by the community and reviewed by developers. Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion!

[Iain Lane (laney)]

I find this curious. You're saying that having update-manager report the correct amount of required space is a feature request? Accuracy is not a feature.