desktop update failure (F9beta)

Andrew Farris lordmorgul at gmail.com
Mon Apr 7 20:15:33 UTC 2008


Joe Smith wrote:
> Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Mon, 2008-04-07 at 11:15 -0400, Joe Smith wrote:
>>> A root fs needing >300Mb of disk space still makes no sense to me.
>>
>> If you're going to play silly games with tiny filesystems, make sure
>> things like /var(/cache) are suitably big enough ...
> 
> First, I agree, it is silly; 300M is 0.1% of the disk space. But I'm an 
> old fart and old habits die hard. And new tricks take time to learn. I 
> like to have real honest-to-god partitions that I know how to deal with, 
> and not put all the eggs in some LVM black basket that I can't 
> troubleshoot. Yes, I know it's silly.
> 
> Second, I do know enough to deal with /var/cache -- that's one reason 
> /var is on a separate partition. My / fs is pushing 300G with no package 
> downloads. The killers are /etc (?!?) and /lib.
> 
> It really would be nice if the "Custom filesystem layout" screens in 
> Anaconda had some rough size recommendations for us old farts who prefer 
> a "traditional" disk layout.
> 
> # du -s -x bin dev etc lib lib64 misc root sbin selinux | sort -rn
> 177843    lib
> 132263    etc
> 26021    lib64
> 21180    sbin
> 6373    bin
> 271    root
> 96    dev
> 0    selinux
> 0    misc
> 
> Sorry, that's 360M used out of 400M I partitioned (388M usable).

As someone who micromanages my partitioning as well...

I think this is good material for the release notes and user's guide, but poor 
material for the actual partitioning UI.  This is highly dependent on how many 
packages are installed, and it will vary (by a big margin) depending on 
architecture, install source (live cd vs dvd, alternate spins), etc.  Also, what 
should the UI do when you have not separated /var from /?  Should its behavior 
be to show you the estimated sum of their sizes?  Which top level directories 
are supported for this then (/var, /lib, /usr, /etc)?

I think it would be non-trivial to make this work well, and its data that just 
does not exist until the spin is nearly complete, meaning it has to be generated 
by rel-engineering during the release freeze (or just be grossly exaggerated 
guesses, which don't really help that much do they?).  Release notes seem like 
the right place to suggest disk space requirements.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> www.lordmorgul.net
  gpg 0x8300BF29 fingerprint 071D FFE0 4CBC 13FC 7DEB  5BD5 5F89 8E1B 8300 BF29




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