Re: Bug#36948: boot-floppies: no (or bad) check for free disk space

[dirson@debian.org]

Martin Schulze writes:
 > > When (erroneously) selecting a profile that would not fit on the
 > > filesystem declared for installation, the installation was launched,
 > > and, obviously, failed because of "not enough free disk space".
 > > 
 > > This left the system in a bad state, with ALL packages in the
 > > unconfigured state, and not enough disk space to even configure them.
 > 
 > This is a general problem.  No current method deals with it properly.

I can understand that the general case is not trivial to solve.
However, a first level of check could be a start.

Especially, when only one partition is used for installation, there
should be not much problem to tell whether the chosen profile will fit
or not.  Surely this does not apply to the dpkg install method, but
really to the boot-floppies package.

Valuable indicators can easily be computed and used for the
first-level check mentionned above:

1) profile size >> sum of all partitions' sizes
 => allow to refuse some profile abviously too big

2) profile size << smallest of all partitions' sizes
 => no problem (includes the optimal test for one-partition installs)

For all cases comprised between these 2 ones, a bold warning MUST be
written that the packaging system _CANNOT_CHECK_ whether disk space is
sufficient.

-- 
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