Bug#368690: Installation fails, when /var/cache/apt/archives is full

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 09:17:10AM +0200, Alexander Schmehl wrote:
> Comments/Problems:
> 
> What basically happend is the following:
> I got a new harddisc.  I moved my old disc, with my old / and /home to
> /dev/hdc and to test the new installer and attached my new disc as
> /dev/hda.  The installer booted up fine, and when asked I told him to
> use /dev/hda entirely for seperate partitions.  Seeing the details of
> the proposed partioning, I made some changes, most notable I removed the
> partition intended for /var (I wanted to use my old root partition on
> /dev/hdc1 later for that).  So /var resided on the rest of the /, which
> got only 300 MB, or so.
> 
> The Rest of the story is easy:
> 
> During tasksel, I told him to install a desktop system.  After
> downloading 206 of 627 files to install, /var/cache/apt/archives became
> to big for that partition, and the progressbar stopped.

I would advocate a separate /var/cache in those cases.

> I didn't got a warning, that my / was to small for /var, nor an error
> message, when the installation process coudln't continue.

It should be possible to do step-wise installs with in-process removal of the
already installed packages, no ?

> Okay, it's a clear user error, but it can't be called an error, without
> an proper error message, can it? ;)

I don't think it is a user error.

Friendly,

Svne Luther