Description of problem: yum issues "needs more space" issues for RPMs that don't go anywhere near the filesystem in question. In this specific case, there were 56 updates being installed, and only 1 actually touched /usr/src (which was admittedly almost full) - but other RPMs issued messages as well. This seems to be a manifestation of a more general problem where yum says an RPM needs more space when the *real* problem is "this RPM plus some unspecified list of *other* RPMs need more space" Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): yum-2.9.5-4 How reproducible: Install a bunch of RPMs that includes 1 that will not fit on a specific filesystem, and watch other RPMs be flagged as well. Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Lots of totally erroneous and misleading messages Expected results: *one* message that indicates the actual RPM that has a problem. Additional info: There appears to be a code confusion between "*this* RPM won't fit on the filesystem" and "the aggregate RPMs selected won't all fit". In the latter case, a simple report by filesystem of additional space needed would be better "The selected packages need the following additional space: nnnM on /, nnnM on /usr, nnnM on /usr/share, nnnM on /usr/src". I've noticed this same effect on other yum runs before, where a large set of updates that included glibc would issue lots of messages for /usr/share, but updating glibc first and then doing everything else would work (because glibc needs some 200M free on /usr/share all by itself). On the other hand, if there wasn't enough space on /usr/share to install glibc *by itself*, that's a totally different issue that can't be solved by issuing multiple 'yum' commands to update selected components a few at a time. Transaction Check Error: installing package kernel-devel-2.6.17-1.2608.fc6 needs 5MB on the /usr/src filesystem installing package glibc-common-2.4.90-28 needs 5MB on the /usr/src filesystem installing package recode-3.6-22.fc6 needs 5MB on the /usr/src filesystem installing package SDL_mixer-1.2.7-2.fc6 needs 5MB on the /usr/src filesystem installing package SDL_mixer-devel-1.2.7-2.fc6 needs 5MB on the /usr/src filesystem installing package xorg-x11-fonts-Type1-7.1-2 needs 5MB on the /usr/src filesystem (and about 40 more messages)
This is the way that RPM provides the information. There's not much else we can do with it :(