[tlbuild] tlmgr/install-tl bug: running out of disk space

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Johannes,

> pretest server) on a too small drive, that ran out of space amidst
> installation.

We are aware of that, yes. And we don't deal with it at all at the
moment.

> I don't know which heuristics apply to decide for retrying. Apparently
> they are not clever enough to distinguish a failure of TLUtils::untar
> due to a full target device, from a shaky internet connection. It is

Any failure will be treated as reason to retry. It could be a corrupted
download so that unxz does not work, or whatever reason.

> also debatable which behaviour to expect in the case of running out of

Right, it is not clear what to do in this case.

And honestly, I have seen similar things with dpkg/apt and any other
package manager. If you run out of space, you are hosed.

> install-tl already has an install size estimation. I feel like it would
> be appropriate (if technically feasible) that we check for space left

First of all, we would need to also make size predictions about the
saved containers, and the intermediate files.
And then, we need to be able to query the free disk space across all
operating systems.

I am not really sure that (1) all this can be done easily (everything
can be done, but without hours and hours of engineering time is the
point here), (2) that it will gain us a lot, and last but not least (3)
that I have the time to look into it.

> Anyhow. The situation was awkward, I could not stop install-tl from
> stubbornly trying its thing. Repeated Ctrl-C does nothing, it just goes

Ctrl-Z followed by a kill -9 would have stopped it.

> The “Rerunning the installer will try to restart the installation.”
> sounds optimistic, given that there apparently isn't even space to

We don't evaluate what is the reason, so we don't know that re-trial
will be failing.

Best

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
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