Package: release-notes Severity: normal Currently the release notes has a section related to how to check if you have sufficient space to upgrade the system (with tips telling users how to make up space if needed). However, there are some situations in which the user's system might be tight on space and they need information on how to do *partial* upgrades. I have currently faced this situation in my laptop (which has *only* 4GB of space dedicated to a Debian installation [1]) and I've had to make an upgrade from an ancient etch to a recent etch, so it might be considered a very large "upgrade" (I still had Xfree86, for example and had yet to make the move to Xorg). It had to download ~690MB of packages to do the upgrade and the system only has ~300MB free. Unfortunately, apt/aptitude happily chews on all the available disk space (and more) if you just say "Go ahead!" to an upgrade which you cannot fully download to disk (and it is not intelligent enough to remove packages from the cache if space is needed) There's no indication on what steps should be taken to upgrade the system under these conditions. I guess one mechanism would be to do partial upgrades like this: - upgrade only 'important' or 'standard' packages - clean the package cache - upgrade the X window system - clean the package cache - upgrade the desktop environment - clean the package cache - dist-upgrade the rest of the system Can we document this kind of suggestions? Or should we just tell the user in this situation (i.e. to those which the documented tips are insufficient) to a) run 'apt-get dist-upgrade' (would fail when the disk is full) and 'apt-get clean' again and again until the system is upgrade or b) get hold of a temporary location (either through NFS or through an USB hard disk) and make /var/cache/apt/ point there during the upgrade or c) use an NFS-mounted mirror repository for the upgrade (that would prevent them being copied over to the local system and reduce disk space needs, right?) Ideas? Regards Javier [1] It is probably, however, slightly bloated :)
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