Re: upgrade nightmare from slink to potato
On Fri, Mar 10, 2000 at 07:03:03PM +0100, Bjoern Brill wrote:
[...]
> I also had to forcibly reinstall with dpkg some "severly broken" packages,
> but I think this was only because I ran out of disk space in
> mid-upgrade (aaargh!).
[...]
Ah, yes. I know the woes of this well. Low disk space can severely break
a system, when changing software. Maybe I'll stop moaning and fix it,
soon, when I have free time. (Ha!)
In any case, failure should be nicer. Prompt me to remove the package,
or leave the fragment still installed.
Here's a not-entirely-related idea:
FTPing every selection, and then installing everything in another pass
wastes time and disk space. We can retreive and install at the same time
(not the same thing, of course).
If we divide a selection list into chunks by their interrelation, we can
make a process get a lump of packages. When it's finished, it flags
those packages as installable, and an installer does its thing (keeping
the user busy with the usual questions) and cleans up those package files
at the end, meanwhile the FTPer is transferring the next lump.
If a package FTP fails, then we don't try to install its lump, and
we grab the user's attention when the installer's finished with it.
This way, one doesn't need half of your disk space free when
upgrading-dist, e.g..
- chad
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