apt-get dist-upgrade and disk space
This is really two questions about apt.
First, how can I limit the amount of package archive that apt is
allowed to keep around? I have an old system with only 50 MB of free
disk space. It's running potato and I want to upgrade to woody via
http (there's no CD drive). But if I do "apt-get dist-upgrade", apt
will try to download way more than 50 MB of packages, will fill up the
disk and the upgrade will fail and my system will probably be trashed.
The only thing I could find in the apt documentation was a passing
reference to the config entry Dir::Cache::archives saying if I set
it to a blank value, apt will not cache any archive files. Will a
dist-upgrade still work if I do this? Is there a better way?
Second, is there a way to make apt (or dpkg) fail gracefully if a
partition fills up? I recently did a dist-upgrade upgrade from potato
to woody (on a different system than described above). It completed
without giving any indication of failure, but when I rebooted I got
the dreaded "LI" prompt (instead of "LILO"). Only when I booted with
a rescue disk did I discover that the root partition was 100% full.
After a little panicked messing around, I finally trashed an old
Windows partition (yay!) to get more space, repartitioned and
installed woody from scratch.
Thanks in advance.
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