[Yum] out of space in /var

[Robert P. J. Day]

  in my attempt to yummify a somewhat out-of-date 0.94 fedora system, i
just typed

  # yum update

verified that there was lots of network traffic as packages were being
downloaded, and went for coffee.  silly me.  i didn't check that there was
adequate space for the numerous packages that were going to be updated
in /var/cache/yum.

  after a while, not surprisingly, /var ran out of space and the yum
update aborted.  given that it appears that nothing was updated, i'm
assuming that, when doing an update, *all* updateable RPMs must be
downloaded successfully before the actual update will start, right?

  given that i'm not prepared to make /var bigger, i suspect i have
a couple choices.  i can always symlink /var/cache/yum to some location
in a larger filesystem.  or i can tell you to use a different location
for the cache directory.

  i notice that you can specify a different cache directory in yum.conf
with "cachedir", but there's no command-line option for that, right?
this is obviously not hard to work around, i just wanted to make sure
i knew all of my options and there wasn't an obscure yum feature that
would beat this.

  anything else here i should know about?

rday