Bug#232056: tetex-base: problem generating mf.base after upgrade
"Pascal A. Dupuis" <Pascal.Dupuis@esat.kuleuven.ac.be> schrieb:
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 12:16:23PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
>> Can't you remember wheter you did erase stuff between the upgrade
>> error and the manual texconfig run?
>>
>
> At the end of january I had to purge /var/cache/apt/archive, otherwise
> /var was full.
This doesn't answer my question - did you do the upgrade of tetex-base
before that purge or after it? If you did, this is a possible
explanation for the failure to build base.fmt. If not, there must be a
real bug.
>> > May be
>> > this should be tested by the install/upgrade script ?
>>
>> No, not really. There are lots of packages that require some more space
>> than what the simple unpackaged size of its archive. If we would do it,
>> all of them would have to, and also check whether the free space is on
>> the correct partition. This is not feasible.
>
> Another suggestion is that this could in the apps which run the postconf
> or install scripts ?
I cannot imagine a sane way to do it. Neither do we know how big the
generated files get (depends on number of fonts installed - possibly
locally, how many hyphenation patterns are integrated etc.), nor how
much free space is considered "enough".
Look, install scripts are usually run as root, so we can use 100% if we
like. This isn't really clever, because it makes it impossible to
recover after an error. Imagine what happens if the system hangs
because some application crashes if /var/ is unwritable, you do a hard
reboot, and e2fsck cannot write to /var/lost&found because /var is
full...
So we clearly would have to decide something that is tolerable. No
matter which value we take, one user would complain that we made his
system nearly unusable by cluttering /var "You do have this check, so I
expect it to work", while an other complains he cannot install tetex
because we decided that we need more than he wants to give us.
No, this is clearly up to the local admin.
>> I rather think this is something that is up to the local administrator.
>
> That's me, and I don't purge /var/cache/apt/archive manually, in order
> to update my home PC, where the net access is through a modem.
(Just a remark: I recommend using apt-proxy, but that doesn't solve
space problems, although there's some automagic purging mechanism)
Well, you can do it by a cron job, or write a wrapper script around
apt-get to output you a `df -h` before it proceeds.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie
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