From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Q312461) Description of problem: Enhancement request: When installing packages and an error is encountered, give other options rather than "OK to die." Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): RHL 7.3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Fresh installation of RHL7.3 (over the network, in my case). 2. Configure/partition everything and start installing packages. 3. If there are any errors while downloading a package (gnome-applets in my case) from the installation server, the installer will display a window that shows something like, "Disk space or package problem encountered. Click OK to quit installation." Actual Results: Click OK and the installation stops. Expected Results: I would expect a few more options like "Retry" and "Ignore". Additional info: From the one of the other virtual consoles, I could see that there was no shortage of disk space, so the problem must have occurred during the downloading of the gnome-applets package. It wouldn't have taken much for the installer to re-attempt downloading the package. Instead, the installer quit and wasted 30 minutes of my time in the middle of my RHCE exam. The subsequent installation was successful as was every other installation in the exam room. (Fortunately, I could show to the examiner that the lost time was no fault of my own, and he gave me more time.) Perhaps a different error window is needed for errors, such as disk space, that are not recoverable.
Unfortunately, that is an error which is passed up directly from RPM. If you hit it, then there really isn't anything to do other than to fail as gracefully as possible; the package failing to install could as well be glibc as anything else which would leave you with a non-working system.