Bug#636694: locales-all postinst can fail when free space in /tmp is limited
severity 636694 normal
thanks
On Fri, Aug 05, 2011 at 01:36:55PM +0200, Didier Raboud wrote:
> Package: locales-all
> Version: 2.13-14
> Severity: important
>
> Hi,
>
> during the last upgrade of locales-all to 2.13-14, I noticed that it failed
> with weird error messages:
>
> …
> tar: ./fur_IT/LC_NAME: Cannot hard link to `./wo_SN/LC_NAME': No such file or
> directory
> tar: ./fur_IT: Cannot mkdir: No space left on device
> …
>
> which was in fact due to too limited free space in /tmp (mine is 357M, I had ~
> 50M available). So I wonder if using /tmp in postinst is really the safest
> way as any user can fill /tmp and hence forbid the upgrade of locales-all.
The problem there is that xz/lzma compression is not yet accepted in the
archive, so to be able to have such a package in the archive (the
package would be 7 times bigger with gzip, and refused by the
ftpmasters) we need to provide a tar.lzma that needs to be uncompressed
at installation time.
The postinst uses $TMPDIR, so you can use another directory if you don't
have enough space in /tmp. Note that dpkg also uses $TMPDIR, and is also
not able to install any package in that if $TMPDIR is full. To prevent
any attack by a user, you should reserve some space to the superuser. The
problem is not specific to locales-all, therefore it doesn't warrant
severity important. It also will be a wontfix until we have xz/lzma
support in the archive.
> (By the way, this is probably related to #537743 too…).
Yes, if we can have xz/lzma compression in the archive, that would fix
the issue.
--
Aurelien Jarno GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
aurelien@aurel32.net http://www.aurel32.net
Reply to: