Re: apt-get dist-upgrade and disk space
On Sat, 2002-09-07 at 22:31, David Zelinsky wrote:
> 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?
Im not familiar with this, but you could first run an apt-get clean to
clear out the archives and then look at how much space you have for the
dist-upgrade. If this fails you try finding major packages that have
alot of things that have versioned dependancies on them then do an
apt-get install <package> and see how much in terms of archives it pulls
in and slowly upgrade your system that way. Try libc6, perl, apache,
python, and the like. You can check the output of apt-get -u
dist-upgrade to get more packages to do the install trick on. This
would be the best way I know of, though if you can find the option you
spoke of above and use it I would think that would be better, but I fear
that it only refers to how big apt will let the archive grow before
deleting stuff and not to how much disk space it will use durring an
upgrade. Though I of course could be wrong.
> 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.
You could have run apt-get clean after your dist-upgrade. Also I am
assuming you installed a new kernel for the upgrade(or there would have
been no need for the reboot) are you sure you ran lilo? Im not sure
that lilo even cares about a full partition at that point in the boot.
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