I think that the cause of the “fight” here is the (implied) characterisation of slackware as an amateur OS. In my experience with other OSes and in general software that support mission critical data businesses, bugs do exist and maintenance plans are always in place. As long as we accept this fact and work towards eliminating them there is no reason to give labels or to be offended by them. Clearly the process should be stopped after the first error and inform the user. But this doesn t make slackware an amateur os. A bug has been found, it will be corrected and more robustness will be added to slackware.

I don't think I have ever had my root partition fill up on a physical computer, but it has happened on VMs. Either way, it is impossible to completely prevent the system partition from filling up. There's always the possibility that some rogue process will cause logfiles to get spammed and fill up. Yes, you can do a lot to minimize the chances of something like this from happening, and it is rare that logfiles will do that, but it is still worthwhile to have system tools at least show a proper error when the system partition is full.

How big are your root partitions? Mine is 30GB and I had to clear out the /tmp files yesterday which cleared another 5.8GB, otherwise it would have been full.

Had that happen at work only a couple of months ago. An oddball xpad quirk caused the user's ~/.xsession-errors log to grow massively. My inability to do anything when I remoted in prompted me to start digging.

A majority of people do not monitor disk space. A simple sanity check in installpkg seems a reasonable request. Sh-t happens.

How best to do that?

One of the things I really like about the Linux world is how bug reports are embraced and welcomed.

So don't worry, my "thank you" was sincere. Of course you were right!


Though the airplane crash analogy is a bit dramatic...

It depends on the system and drives, but on my main desktop, my root partition is 250GB with about 200GB of it being used (100GB of that being in my /tmp folder, that I just haven't cleaned out from building packages). My htpc has a 100GB root partition and only about 20GB is used.

A bug report reports a problem and leaves the passive-aggressive comments out.

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Mine never ever have been larger then 10 GB (although at work we used about 50 GB).
Note that most of the "user" files are NOT in / (my home dir is only 468 MB, which is mostly the config dirs) and I keep all log and tmp dirs very clean. I do NOT use logrotate, wrote my own scripts for that.

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Could you please point out the "passive-aggressive comments" on the first post, where the OP reported the bug?
He got a little miffed later (and rightly so IMHO) when he reported a bug (and yes, it IS a bug) and got told it was all his fault for being a poor sysadmin by not checking disk space before upgrading the OS.

All software has bugs.
Slackware is not immune to them. It is not perfect, despite what some die-hard users may think.
All things can be improved.
If we, as a community scare away people that try to report bugs we are doing a disservice to Slackware and its maintainer(s).

This is not the sort of thing I would expect from the Slackware community.

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I couldn't have a 10GB root partition unless I started doing some more in-depth partitioning and/or lvm or if I slimmed down packages. My /usr/ folder is 11GB on my htpc, which is just an older -current, and everything needed for kodi.

It was not in the OP, which this is the part that, I believe, RC was referring to:

Anyway, the OP was edited a couple of days later so I'm not 100% sure [and I can't be bothered to check since I'm going to cook supper]. Either way, let's not turn this into an argument, the KDE thread is that way >>>

A note: my proposed patch was created in 14.2. The patch needs massaging for Current.

If deemed important, a disk partition sanity check could be added. The package compression needs to be pierced to obtain true file size requirements. If multiple packages are being installed/updated, then the sanity check should loop through all packages before comparing to the remaining disk space.

A simple test might be to grab the /bin/df percentage output and if greater than, say, 95%, post a warning message and ask the user whether to continue.

I really wouldn't waste any time, but leave the sanity check to the user...

"Slackware! The distro that takes you by the hand!"

Mine's 100GB. I have /home on its own partition. Right now root is about 20% used. On my last computer, root was 25GB, and I was constantly in trouble, if /tmp filled up too much.

So, what is the drawback to adding......to the beginning of both /sbin/upgradepkg and /sbin/installpkg ?

Or perhaps follow other advice found at https://intoli.com/blog/exit-on-errors-in-bash-scripts/ for the package management scripts.

Of course, slackpkg would have to do the same by failing when upgradepkg or installpkg return an error code.

When I submit a bug report, I attempt to provide the information required to reproduce the problem that I encountered as well as any specific hints that might help solve the problem.

That not because I'm a nice guy (my nick here should preclude people believing that for more than a microsecond or two) but because I want the *bleeping* problem solved so I can do what I was trying to do when the *bleeping* problem reared its ugly head. Along those lines, I've finally figured out (the hard way, alas) that insulting the people that you want to fix said problem doesn't seem to place your report on the top of the "bugs I'm gonna fix" list.

To the best of my knowledge, none of us here are paid to post responses to anything. To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Volkerding's income from Slackware is orders of magnatude less than RedHat's market cap of ~$20B.

The OP was an amateur, IMO.