bug reports regarding users running out of disk space

[Aigars Mahinovs]

2009/4/12 Chris Cheney <ccheney at ubuntu.com>:
> On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 11:28 +0100, (``-_-´´) -- BUGabundo wrote:
>> Olá Chris e a todos.
>>
>> On Friday 10 April 2009 19:47:13 Chris Cheney wrote:
>> > As dpkg-deb recognizes this issue it should not causing an error such
>> > that users can report these issues as bugs and instead should be telling
>> > the user they ran out of disk space in the gui. I am not sure what
>> > package I should be reporting this an issue on, is it a bug in dpkg,
>> > apt, update-manager or do all three need changes?
>>
>> AFAIK Update Manager checks for disk space before installing new packages. I have a 10GiBs / and keep getting that warning.
>> I'm not sure that it checks before or after download. If it is only after, then its a bug, 'cause it "knows" the amount of data to be transfered.
>
> Even if it does check the check would only be able to tell if your
> overall system has enough space as the Size: field in dpkg control only
> tells the overall disk space used not per directory. So for any
> complicated partitioning setups it wouldn't really have any way of
> knowing. Also if it checks at the beginning of downloading updates but
> doesn't also include the size of the packages (the debs themselves) that
> are being downloaded and cached, or doesn't check after downloading as
> well, then it could easily run out of space due to that reason as the
> debs could easily take up hundreds of megabytes.

An Ubuntu desktop system with a bunch of extra software installed, can
easily pull 2-3 Gb of updates when upgrading between releases or when
tracking the development release. Also if you install a stable desktop
and then come back to it after a year or two, the security updates
could be large enough to make even a 10 Gb root partition too small.

-- 
Best regards,
    Aigars Mahinovs        mailto:aigarius at debian.org
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