Description of problem: It appears that rpms left in /tmp/cache/<repo>/packages consume memory during install. Perhaps they can be deleted immediately after being installed? I was finally able to get a text mode install completed on a 320MB machine by continually cleaning out those directories.
I'm sitting and watching an install now (http) and the packages are getting removed after they're installed as they should be. What install type were you doing as this should be working afaik.
This doesn't happen with the main repo but with any added repos. See also bug #216677.
It also does not happen when the main install source is url --url=http: , but it does when the source is nfs.
This should be fixed up as of Fedora 8 Test2. Brief description of what was going on -- * in anaconda, we have the concept of an install method which is the base repository location * in the long past, we used to grab files using per-method functionality; with the move to yum, we instead just grabbed generically * but we still did a method-specific close/remove of the files after the package was installed * this meant if you were doing nfs, we didn't unlink the file as the unlink path was only with url methods Now, we've moved to use hte install method less for these things and instead just determine if we need to delete or not based on the baseurl for the repo. So things will now have the right thing happen.