[Yum] one more posting on "yum update" and /usr space issue

[Robert P. J. Day]

  just to beat this savagely to death (or "overdiscuss" it :-),
before i tried a full "yum update", my /usr filesystem was 6G
and was about 5.5G full.  so i still had half a gig to play with,
which seemed plenty at the time.

  when i checked "yum list", i was told i had about 350 packages
that could be updated.  so i ran "yum update", which failed, telling
me i was about 250M short of space in /usr.  curious, i thought,
since i wasn't installing new packages, just updating existing
ones and i couldn't believe that newer packages would be that
much larger.

  but, as seth mentioned, yum apparently takes its space diagnostics
from rpm, and i don't know how rpm is deciding what is and is not
sufficient space.  so i started updating a chunk at a time:

  yum update "a*"
  yum update "b*"

just to see what would happen.  turns out this was one solution --
doing updates in smaller pieces worked fine, and "df" afterwards
showed little change in the usage of /usr.

updating the numerous "kde" packages was a stumbling point, so i just
added

  exclude=kde*

to yum.conf for the time being, and finished the update in one operation.  
end result was that i still had 400M left under /usr (yes, i know that's
getting tight, i'll shift things around later.)

  so, finally, i figured to update all the kde stuff, removed that line
from yum.conf, "yum update", only to be told that i was all of 18M short
in /usr.  argh, so close!  ok, so

  exclude=kde-i18n*

and "yum update" is off and running.  when it's done, i still have
400M available in /usr, so i remove the exclude statement, run
"yum update" and everything works.  when that's done, i still have
405M of /usr to spare and a fully-updated system.

  the moral of the story?  that "out of space" warning certainly has
the potential to bite people who don't know about it and have a lot
of pending updates.

rday