On Sun, Jun 11, 2000 at 14:49:40 -0700, Joey Hess wrote:
> A severity grave bug is defined as one that "makes the package in
> question unuseable or mostly so, or causes data loss, or introduces a
> security hole allowing access to the accounts of users who use the
> package."
I chose this severity before I found out the TMPDIR workaround. The
package wasn't installable at all, which makes it "unuseable or mostly so"
to me. I could have changed it later, sorry.
> Please point me to either a security hole, data loss, or proof that most
> people have /tmp or TMPDIR pointing to a partition that is a mere 14 mb
> in size.
IMHO it's a Good Thing to have a small root partition and a large /usr
(and perhaps other large partitions for /var and/or /home). I could make
/tmp a symlink to /usr/tmp or /var/tmp if I could be sure that nothing
needs /tmp at boot time before the other partitions are mounted. Is there
some kind of policy that assures this? (Cc'ing to debian-devel for this.)
I wrote:
> > When trying to install realplayer I get the following message:
> > Setting up realplayer (7.0.2.2) ...
> > 41553 blocks
> > cpio: write error: No space left on device
> > dpkg: error processing realplayer (--configure):
> > subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
> > Errors were encountered while processing:
> > realplayer
> This is exactly how I would expect a well-behaved package to behave when
> it ran out of disk space. It detected that it was out of space,
> displayed an error to that effect, and aborted.
Sure, but there is abulutely no direct evidence that /tmp is the place
where there is not enough space. If you get the following output from df:
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 46632 27773 16454 63% /
/dev/hda2 2028129 1563761 359548 81% /usr
Do you think some plain sysadmin would consider 63% or 81% to be an
almost-full filesystem?
> > After trying around a bit, I found out that 14 MB in my root filesystem
> > (which includes /tmp) isn't enough. Setting TMPDIR to point to some other
> > filesystem worked for me, but I still consider this a bug. Isn't it
> > possible to unpack the player to some other directory, like the dpkg spool
> > dir?
> What guarentee is there that the dpkg spool directory has the several
> megabytes of free space needed by the installer?
The spool directory is part of the /usr (or /var) filesystem, where the
package gets installed anyway. So if there is not enough space to unpack
the rpm, there is probably also not enough space to install the package
itself.
> I'm inclined to close this as a non-bug and/or administrator error.
I think I could agree if the error message would point out that it is
/tmp where there is not enough space.
- Stephan.
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