I had problems upgrading from RH 7.0 to the beta Wolverine version. The first time, after I selected packages to upgrade, it said that it needed a few hundred K more space in /, and let me go back and de-select some packages. This was a bit uncool, in that the package selection pages give no hint whatsoever of how much space they need in / (vs /usr, etc). It also gave no way of dropping into a shell to manually clean up any unneeded files, other than rebooting. I wanted to keep all the selections I had made, so I kept going. This time it said it needed 15 Megs in /. At this point I removed the CD and rebooted the system. What I found in /var/lib/rpm was two temporary copies of the Packages database, at about 13-14 Megs apiece, both created during the upgrade attempt. The upgrade process should either remove the working copy of the database before returning to the selection process, or reuse the same file the next time it checks for dependencies and disk space. It should also provide usable information to help choose packages to leave out of the upgrade. Even more valuable would be some way to delete existing packages, in addition to the choice between upgrading or not.
These temporary files are removed if you exit the installer cleanly. Since you rebooted there was no opportunity to clean them up. Matt could we be better about looking in /var/lib/rpm and removing left over temp files to free space?
Excuse me? Where does the installer give any option to exit cleanly when there is not enough space to do the upgrade? Before I rebooted, I went back and deselected some packages. Then when I clicked NEXT> to attempt the upgrade again, it created the second 14-meg copy of the database. THIS is where it should have cleaned up the temp space. For that matter, it should blow away any temp files it finds there before it begins the upgrade -- If I had booted the install CD again, I'll bet the garbage would have still been there.
I checked in a patch to remove anaconda-rebuilddbXXXXXXXXX when a rebuild fails or when an upgrade package search fails.