On 2013-11-11 13:27 (GMT-0800) Samuel Sieb composed:
Felix Miata wrote:
I don't seem to be able to find a yum option to not download everything before installing anything. Thus, before upgrading has begun, yum has reduced freespace to 10%, and transaction check thinks it needs more than what was required before beginning to proceed with the upgrade. Freespace before trying to upgrade was 21%, which I would expect to change no more than nominally as a result of upgrading. Is there no such option?
What happens if you start the upgrade, then lose your network connection or for some other reason can't get all the packages? You have a good chance of not being able to boot your system after that.
Certainly, potential for trouble.
However:
key context: testing
keyword: option
And:
1-Downloading clumps of related rpms seems to have been the default behavior of URPMI for nearly a decade if not longer.
2-Zypper offers both clumping and individuals in addition to the default to fetch them all first. I've been setting individuals as my default on *all* openSUSE installations on my own systems for as long as the option has been available. I really can't remember encountering the trouble you describe in the 5+ years since Zypper was born.
3-ISTR Apt-get at least has an option for clumping.
Furthermore:
All my own systems used for testing are multiboot. If a particular installation becomes unbootable for some reason, fixing it is usually no big deal.
So, absence of any _option_ for Yum to not download everything first seems like an arbitrary obstacle for limited space test installations, if not for others.
I worked around the immediate problem by inventorying installed packages, and removing all kinds of junk I can't imagine ever having use for (e.g. non-western fonts, ratpoison, ModemManager, isdn*, mobile*, most firmwares, os-prober). Then I separately yum installed various packages of large size and/or likely to dep upgrade other packages. Once free space was back up to 88%, yum upgrade was able to complete. Now that it's done, consumption is 83%, compared to the 79% before yum upgrade but after yum clean all. After another yum clean all, it's 79% again.
What could have taken at most 30 minutes took closer to 3 hours, including time trying to find the apparently non-existent option.