dpkg doesn't detect disk full condition

[Paolo Benvenuto]

Binary package hint: dpkg

I was doing a cdromupgrade from hardy to intrepid, and I'm pretty sure I had the necessary disk space (I got this piece of information running do-release-upgrade).

However, when unpacking the new packages, the upgrade told me (in a message window) that dpkg couldn't unpack some package. I can't remember the exact message, but it wasn't a disk full message. I could see that the problem was that issuing a df command.

So I manually deleted a number of files, collected some 400MB more disk space, and closed the message window. This way the installation continued smoothly.

I was disappointed by the fact that dpkg could not realize what was the cause of the problem.

I suggest that dpkg check the disk full condition in case of problems.

Accidentaly, is it possible that the distribution upgrade app calculated badly the necessary disk space?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

dpkg's job is to leave the system in a recoverable state when this sort of thing happens; I don't think it should get into the job of predicting how much disk space is available. That seems more like a job for higher-level tools like update-manager.

If dpkg didn't say "No more space on device", then that genuinely wasn't the error code it got from the kernel and/or the C library, though ... without an exact message it isn't possible to diagnose that problem further.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

This is a known issue and reported in many reports. I'm marking this report as duplicate of bug 160027 .

Thanks for your time and don't hesitate to submit any new bug.