Re: Problems with apt

On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 23:09 +0200, Horst Graffy wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 31. März 2005 22:41 schrieb Panu Matilainen:
> > On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 20:38 +0200, Richard Bos wrote:
> > > Op donderdag 31 maart 2005 20:02, schreef Horst Graffy:
> > > > this means your list of packages is to large (1244 to upgrade).
> > > >
> > > > split your upgrade into smaller pieces:
> >
> > "Smaller than 900" sounds like overflow of a hard limit somewhere but I
> > don't see anything obvious from a quick check and I don't remember
> > seeing this myself no matter how big the upgrade was (but then I'm not
> > sure if I've actually done an upgrade with over 1000 packages ever). I'm
> > not really familiar with the fetcher method code but getting a core dump
> > and a backtrace from it might help ... (live gdb backtrace would be just
> > as well but I don't think you can easily attach to the forked process
> > from gdb before it dies).
> AFAIK the limit was always around 1000 packages, so the number 900 is below 
> 1000 ;)
> And I haven't installed so much packages in my systems ... so I can't help to 
> reproduce the error or get some debug informations.
> 
> But a lot of people with large updates reported this problem and I know it is 
> hard to replay this transaction, because with the split in smaller pieces it 
> has always worked ... 
Wild guess:

I have seen this happening when apt-get was running out of disk space
in /var (rsp. /var/cache/apt) during updates/upgrades.

Ralf