yum update requests a few megabytes and can't see there's plenty available

[Thiers Botelho]

Hi all,


Bear with me today please. After a half-slept night finishing a long 
overdue report I feel like a brainless zombie . . .     :-/

As I'm now toiling on the dark side of my dual-boot box (no Lotus Notes on 
Fedora yet, folks), I will quote some errors from memory (er . . . my 
cerebral memory, not my computer memory). If needed, I'll make a supreme 
effort to move myself and penetrate the mirror to Fedora's side and 
reproduce this stuff more exactly.

Well, it goes like this: 

I did the sequence below quite a few times with 100% success:


========================
yum check-update
df -k
yum update ab* cd*      (4 to 10 packages at a time)
df -k
yum update ef* gh*      (a few more packages while available filesystem 
space does not shrink much)
df -k
yum clean
df -k
========================


After a number of iterations (at the end of each I had about 200 Mb 
available on filesystem) I had managed to shrink the update queue to about 
12 large packages.

Then I started to receive following error from yum update (for any single 
package, first one glibc IIRC):


========================
6Mb are required in the / filesystem
========================


I tried each of the remaining packages and received same message for each 
one, with varying Mb values (up to 17 for mozilla I think).

After some some searches and googling I'm still clueless. Anyone with an 
idea on what's this issue about ?

BTW, I have only 3 filesystems - /boot,  / and swap, and I don't think I 
might have been watching the wrong one.


Cheers

Thiers