bug reports regarding users running out of disk space

[Chris Cheney]

On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 11:28 +0100, (``-_-´´) -- BUGabundo wrote:
> Olá Chris e a todos.
> 
> On Friday 10 April 2009 19:47:13 Chris Cheney wrote:
> > As dpkg-deb recognizes this issue it should not causing an error such
> > that users can report these issues as bugs and instead should be telling
> > the user they ran out of disk space in the gui. I am not sure what
> > package I should be reporting this an issue on, is it a bug in dpkg,
> > apt, update-manager or do all three need changes?
> 
> AFAIK Update Manager checks for disk space before installing new packages. I have a 10GiBs / and keep getting that warning.
> I'm not sure that it checks before or after download. If it is only after, then its a bug, 'cause it "knows" the amount of data to be transfered.

Even if it does check the check would only be able to tell if your
overall system has enough space as the Size: field in dpkg control only
tells the overall disk space used not per directory. So for any
complicated partitioning setups it wouldn't really have any way of
knowing. Also if it checks at the beginning of downloading updates but
doesn't also include the size of the packages (the debs themselves) that
are being downloaded and cached, or doesn't check after downloading as
well, then it could easily run out of space due to that reason as the
debs could easily take up hundreds of megabytes.

Chris