Upgrade fails when not enough disk space

[Steve Cohen <stevecoh mcs com>]

I recently purchased the Mandrake edition of LInux which is Redhat 5.2 +
KDE to install on top of a Redhat 5.0 system.  When I started the
installation process, I of course selected the Upgrade option.  I went
merrily along choosing my components to install and began the upgrade.
The upgrade got about a third of the way through when it started running
out of disk space in my / partition.  I wasn't sure if I should let it
go through to the end or abort with Ctrl-Alt-Del so I decided to let it
go through to the end.  Many packages refused to install, but
eventually, it was over.  When I rebooted my new system it refused to
load.  I couldn't get to a login prompt.

At this point there was nothing to do but wipe out the / and /usr
partitions and install fresh.  While doing that I also enlarged / at the
expense of /usr.  Fortunately, most of the stuff I had been working on
was in separate /usr/local or /home partitions or I would have been real
toast.   Anyway, this worked and I was more or less functional again and
after a few agonies, happy with the upgrade.

Yesterday I desctribed this experience to a mailing list I belong to
which contains both Linux users and LInux avoiders.  The avoiders, of
course, all seized on this as confirmation of their opinions that Linux
still wasn't and never would be ready for prime time.  I didn't have
much of a comeback.

So I would like to raise the issue here.  The RedHat upgrade facility is
in my view seriously compromised by lack of any meaningful disk space
checking.  Granted this is difficult but I don't think it would be
impossible.  RPM can do this math when installing individual packages.
Why couldn't it do a dry run through all the packages and check against
the relevant partitions?  Or at least install the packages in a logical
order that would maximize the chances of having a runnable system -
upgrade first those elements absolutely essential to getting a decent
login, and only then, those elements that are in some sense add-ons.
This would be better than the brain-dead alphabetical order in which the
installer does it now.

It was also pointed out to me by one of the LInux users that the
installer does tell you the total size of the upgrade so that you may
compare it with what you've got.  But there's no way to see how much
space you've got during the upgrade process.   And since it doesn't
break it down by partition, you still don't know if you're going to have
trouble or not.