Re: slink -> potato mostly great, still some rough edges though

[Jules Bean <jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk>]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2000 at 10:22:15PM +0200, Joost Kooij wrote:
> 
> 1.  Disk space problems.
> 
>   I needed to download and store 130Megs of debs.  This machine
>   has enough disk to spare, other machines I own don't.  I found
>   a way to do it using nfs mounts, but it involves some twiddling,
>   as apt appears to be quite picky about locking.
> 
>   Basically, it worked now, but I've been bitten by it before
>   and believe me, it aint pretty.

[snip]

>   B: "ask Jason":
>      1. fix apt-get to be considerate about disk-space and learn it
>         to cope with and work around diskspace problems.  

[snip]

[part of solution 'C']

>   The idea is to provide a cut-down Packages list containing only
>   references to the most basic, "essential" packages.  This would 
>   be used to do a "basic" update.  After that, the next update run 
>   can fetch a second-stage Packages file, this time containing a 
>   bigger set of packages, e.g. the "important" ones.

Jason, (I assume you read apt@packages)

I'm pretty sure that you have previously said that you didn't think
there was a reliable way of achieving part (B)?

However, it does occur to me that policy guarantees that packages in
higher priorities may not depend on packages in lower priorities. Does
this not mean that priorities are an ordering heuristic apt could use
to achieve upgrades in several bits?

Or do problems with versioned dependencies from lower priorities back
to higher ones bite us?  (It seems to me that it may be OK to ignore
such conflicts on installing the new high-priority packages, since the
low-priority ones are going to be installed next; but does that
invalidate some important invariant the prerms of something might rely
on?)

Or is this totally the wrong track, and the right track is to do the
upgrade conceptually in one go, but in practice iterate between
actual downloading and installing stages?

Jules


-- 
Jules Bean                          |        Any sufficiently advanced 
jules@{debian.org,jellybean.co.uk}  |  technology is indistinguishable
jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk              |               from a perl script