[pacman-dev] Pacman Disk Space Issues

[Brendan Hide]

Aaron Griffin wrote:
> Regarding the check - we do get the "size to be installed" at the
> frontend for display - why can't we check freespace there and just
> fail before we even download or install anything? Dan?
Its very sensible to add this feature - though its not going to prevent 
all possible issues.

Given the information at hand during package installation, the robust 
way would be:
check available disk space in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ and / before 
downloading - give appropriate warnings (new feature?)
once downloaded, compare the available disk space in each mount point 
from /etc/mtab to the compressed package's content (new feature) *
still take into account all errors regarding disk space during 
installation (currently-broken feature) **

* You can't tell where the package's files are going until you've 
already downloaded the package. If there are separate mount points for 
different directories in the root, disk space can't be calculated 
beforehand. Assuming there's only a / mount point will work for most 
Arch users - but not all.

** On a busy server or desktop, you can't assume that the disk space 
available at the beginning of the installation isn't going to change 
independently of pacman's actions.

__________
Brendan Hide