Bug#221666: refuses to download if /var/cache/apt/archives is on ram disk

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

severity 221666 wishlist
tanks

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 02:47:29PM +0100, Oliver Kurth wrote:

> when the directory /var/cache/apt/archives is mounted to a ram disk
> (ramfs), apt-get refuses to download packages:
> 
> tammuz:~# apt-get upgrade
> Reading Package Lists... Done
> Building Dependency Tree... Done
> The following packages will be upgraded
> bsdmainutils console-common console-data dnsutils gpdf
> libdbix-searchbuilder-perl libdns11
> libisc7 liblwres1 libpango1.0-0 libpango1.0-common libtool man-db
> python python2.2 python2.3
> zlib1g zlib1g-dev
> 18 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
> Need to get 9715kB of archives.
> After unpacking 1148kB of additional disk space will be used.
> E: You don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/.
> tammuz:~# cat /proc/mounts
> rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0
> /dev/root / ext3 rw 0 0
> proc /proc proc rw 0 0
> devpts /dev/pts devpts rw 0 0
> /dev/hda1 /boot ext3 rw 0 0
> /dev/hda5 /var ext3 rw 0 0
> /dev/hda6 /home ext3 rw 0 0
> /dev/loop0 /mnt/efs ext2 rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec 0 0
> none /mnt/rd ramfs rw 0 0
> none /var/cache/apt/archives ramfs rw 0 0
> tammuz:~# df /mnt/rd/
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> none                         0         0         0   -  /mnt/rd
> tammuz:~#
>       
> 
> Okay, the reason is that there seems to be no space on that partition,
> but it grows dynamically. So there /is/ enough space.

Why not use a tmpfs, which actually has a size and reports proper
statistics?  I don't want to special-case this; apt currently doesn't care
about filesystem types for any other purpose.

> The easy solution would be to have a command line option to override
> that check.

I think it would be even better if ramfs reported something useful from
statvfs; presumably it does in fact have limits (such as virtual memory
size) and knows how much is allociated.

-- 
 - mdz