[pacman-dev] Disk Space

[Brendan Hide]

Matthew Wood wrote:
> What if we checked for disk space on all volumes, prior to the processing of
> the users command.  If the function detects that disk space is lower than a
> certain amount, say 100 mb, to at least warn the user?  This would of course
> be a temporary solution, for a more permanent possibility we could implement
> two functions that work in conjunction with each other.  The first function
> would check the downloads to ensure they completed successfully, if they did
> then it would pass the work to a second function that checks the extracted
> package size against all mounted volumes, or at least the size of the
> volumes of the major installation location (/usr, /etc, /var, etc)  Does
> this make any sense or am I barking up the wrong tree?
>
> Matt  
The extra checks you mention are partially sensible sanity checks 
however they shouldn't replace the currently broken part: pacman does 
not correctly take into account errors given by the deployment part of 
the installation.

On that note however, what would be an appropriate amount of disk space 
to consider enough? OpenOffice.org is the biggest package I have 
installed. It is a little over 150MB in size just for the tar.gz and 
over 330MB for the installation. This number would be wholly 
inappropriate for most packages though. Also, a full system upgrade 
could download well over 700MB, which so far I have had occur (mostly) 
due to the last few KDE 4.2 updates.

One negative use-case is that a random memory stick full of music that 
happens to be plugged in is likely to give a false positive. Most 
Archers would recognise the warning as such and press "Continue" 
appropriately. ;)

The downloaded files are already being checked against md5sums so files 
which are not fully downloaded will fail this check.

Again, this will be properly fixed as soon as pacman correctly takes 
into account the errors given when doing the actual deployment. 
Personally, I like the idea of adding sanity checks - but only if 
they're done properly. ;)

-- 
__________
Brendan Hide