So I installed Fedora 11 Alpha on a 2GB LiveUSB drive using "livecd-iso-to-disk --overlay-size-mb 1024" and the stock ISO. Due to the mass rebuild, there are over 900MB of updates pending. By default, /var/cache/yum is a separate filesystem with a maximum capacity of I think 375MB. In order to get updates to work, you can manually select certain packages to update, and do a number of update cycles. For example, update all packages starting with a, b, d, e, or f for the first round. These packages are deleted after they are installed, so then you can proceed to "g", and so on. An alternative is to mount the hard drive and make /var/cache/yum a symlink to a temporary directory there. I don't recommend this; I tried it and I made my hard drive temporarily unbootable, I think because of an SELinux relabel triggered by one of the updates. The alphabetical method is very time consuming; I'd like to be able to ask people reporting bugs against Fedora 9 or 10: "Try reproducing on the latest Rawhide; just download this ISO, run this command, boot off your USB stick, run 'yum update', and try to reproduce". That's time consuming enough without having to work around LiveUSB disk space limitations. It would be much more convenient if yum detected the limited disk space, and divided the update list into smaller chunks. There's no need to do all of the updates all at once, only the updates where there are cross-package dependencies. yum is already really good at resolving dependencies automatically, and at being a really convenient program to use, so it seems like a natural enhancement.
Some time ago now I tried: http://people.redhat.com/jantill/yum/commands/yum-iter-update.py ...which was my first attempt at this, which mostly does work but needs to be much more intelligent. Long term were looking at putting something inside yum that will split the transaction ... but it's not high on the list. Patches accepted :).
Indeed, I was just going to submit a similar bug report. This feature is availlable in Mandriva's urpmi for years. It enables to: - use less disk while installing or upgrading - prevent a small glitch to prevent the whole installation (such as a %post or %postun failing though there've been improvements in rpm regarding this) - prevent an "updated repository during the local system update" to make a download failed and thus the whole upgrade failed. - ...
Thierry, If you'd like to help work on yum to implement this feature we'll be glad to get some assistance and/or patches for it. thanks, -sv
The beta plugin I did for bug#640918 should also help your case, feel free to try it out and provide feedback.
Closing, since we didn't get a reply.
That plugin doesn't address the original bug report.
yum and related packages are no longer actively developed. They are being replaced with dnf, dnf-utils, etc. I'm closing this bug because it's most likely never going to be fixed. If you still consider your bug report important, reopen it, please.