This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: partition size problem
From: Bruce Richardson <brichardson@lineone.net>
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1999 10:58:24 +0100 (GMT)
On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, widget wrote:
> I followed the guidelines in creating partitions with RH 5.2
>
> months later I tried to install a rpm and got the following message:
>
> [root@dementia sybase]# rpm -ivh sybase-doc-11.0.3.3-1.i386.rpm
> sybase-doc
> #########################################unpacking of archive failed on
> file /opt/sybase/doc/ps/srv110x/sqlug.ps: 1: No space left on device
^^^
There, that's the problem. You've been caught out by the dreaded /opt
directory, which was invented by some moron who deserves a good kicking.
/opt is a directory that someone thought would be a good place to put
non-vital, user-oriented stuff (browsers, X) - never mind that thats
actually what /usr is for. Some software - and all of KDE - installs to
here by default. Since you didn't create opt as a
partition - in fact you didn't create it at all, it's not part of the
standard RH set-up, the rpm created it - it exists as a directory in your
root partition and your root partition is now full of this crap.
If the aforementioned moron had chosen /usr/opt, people would have had a
choice about having a separate partition or not, but this was not a moron
that thinks things through, this was a moron who thought "My idea is good,
so people will just have to live with it", not an uncommon type,
unfortunately.
What can you do?
1. Create a directory /usr/opt and move the contents of /opt into it.
2. Delete /opt and create a soft link /opt that points to /usr/opt
3. Check any future rpms to see if they install to opt. If they do, add
"--prefix /usr/opt" to the rpm command line. It is not safe to trust in
the soft link as rpm tends to overwrite these, which would put you back in
the old mess.
This is happening on such a regular basis to newbies that I think I'm
going to post a "Who was this moron?" message in a few newsgroups to see
if I can flush him/her out.
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