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

[George N. White III]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2022 at 19:11, Norbert Preining <norbert at preining.info> wrote:

> 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.
>

Filling up storage and continuing to hammer it with added processing
that will fail is hard on the media and can reduce performance or even
result in a corrupt filesystem when cached metadata can't be saved.  I have
encountered systems that become read-only for users when a disk hits
some capacity threshold, typically 85%.   For TL installs, it would be
reasonable (and helpful) to warn users if the targeted storage is more than
85 or 90% full.

-- 
George N. White III
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