Bug#246749: tetex-bin: upgrade to 2.0.2-14 fails (bogus 'No space left on device')

[Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr>]

Hi,

Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote:

> This seems to be a metafont error, since the text is only found in
> texk/web2c/mfnowin.c, lines 1417ff:
>
>   if (fwrite (p, item_size, nitems, out_file) != nitems)
>     {
>       fprintf (stderr, "! Could not write %d %d-byte item(s).\n",
>                nitems, item_size);
>       uexit (1);
>     }
>
> and texk/web2c/libs/texmfmp.c (same code, same line number). I have
> hardly any understanding of C. Therefore I don't see how I could
> understand this, any takers?

I tried to find where out_file takes its value from, but failed. The
answer seems to be lost (at least as far as I am concerned) in C files
that have to be generated from the WEB sources...

> mkdir is only called once by /usb/bin/fmtutil, I'm puzzled.

This one I could find out: fmtutil calls (line 422) for every match of
'*.eoft *.oft *.fmt *.efmt *.mem *.base'
/usr/share/texmf/web2c/mktexupd, which sources (line 21)
/usr/share/texmf/web2c/mktex.opt, which performs the mkdir call on line
55.

IMO, the bug is really a space problem in /tmp for the following
reasons:
  1. /tmp is almost full;
  2. Several unrelated programs detected the problem at the same time
     and uh, I really hope mkdir is right on this issue. And it's not
     part of tetex anyway.

IMHO (no, I don't know of any Debian-policy-or-similar document talking
about that), having only 13M of free space there is clearly asking for
trouble. Unless you are working on an embedded system, in which case you
should know what you are doing and need not file important bugs at
random packages when your setup doesn't work.

-- 
Florent