Potato it is!

[montefin <montefin@finux.com>]

Thanks for the advice to my earlier "Frozen, Potato or Woody?" post.

I've decided to take all of it. I ordered a 4-pack of Frozen CD's _and_,
while they're enroute I'm going to get my feet wet with apt-get and
potato.

I've moved stuff around on my little 814Mb hard drive and made 208Mb
available in /usr. Tomorrow, I plan to temporarily mount /var/cache/apt
inside /usr and direct apt-get there.

Question #1: Will 208Mb be enough? I ran 'apt-get update' and it built
the tree. I ran 'apt-get --simulate dist-upgrade' and it showed unmet
depenencies for w3m only.  w3m needs three of the libraries coming with
the upgrade. I forced 'apt-get --simulate -f dist-upgrade' and it ran
with it, showing the 383 Upgrades, 63 new Installs, 30 Removals, and 14
Hold Backs it plans to do.

_But_, apt-get didn't give me any idea of how much /var/apt/cache it
needs to do its magic.

Question #2: I think I've read here several times that apt-get can
predict cache usage, but I've never seen a command or option to tell it
to, and I can't find any in the man pages or docs. Is there?

Question #3: I'm only downloading the i386 binaries, not the sources.
But, even if 208Mb of cache is enough, is robbing /usr to pay /var an
exercise in futility? In other words, is /usr going to simultaneously
need that space that /var is borrowing, in order to recieve the 63
installs, have 383 of it's current packages Upgraded _and_ 30 of them
Removed? Or, is there some capability built into apt that can
choreograph all that?

Thanks for the good advice already, hoping for more,

montefin