Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 81343
Rpm with Freshen option downloads unnecessary files and crashes filling the disk
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:49:35 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Description of problem: Issuing the command rpm with freshen option from a ftp mirror, like: rpm -Fvh ftp://some.ftp.server/some-PATH/*.rpm causes a rather dumb behaviour of rpm: a) it downloads all *.rpm the files, even the unnecessary b) it fills the /var/tmp directory till it crashes causing a segmentation fault. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. choose a ftp server offering more rpm files than your /var/tmp file can hold 2. issue rpm -Fvh ftp://that.ftp.server/some-PATH/*.rpm 3. wait the disk is full Actual Results: segmentation fault Expected Results: 1. I expect rpm not to download any unnecessary files. 2. Rpm should check if there is enough room on /var/tmp before starting to download, and anyway stop in another way than with a segmentation fault Additional info: It would be wise to install at least some packages (with few or no dependencies) separately instead of everything together after downloading all the packages.
rpm downloads files in order to get the information necessary to tell whether the file is to be installed. This cannot be done by looking at file name alone, as the epoch is contained only within the header, and the epoch is necessary to tell whether a package is "newer" Use some other means of upgarding, like up2date/apt/yum/autorpm/etc, instead of a remote glob if you wish to minimize bandwidth and disk space usage.