blog/data/2018-07-08-apt-upgrade-full-disk.txt

   1 Title: Debian APT upgrade without enough free space on the disk...
   2 Tags: english, debian
   3 Date: 2018-07-08 12:10
   4
   5 <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
   6 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
   7 space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'.  I normally
   8 would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install &lt;somepackages&gt;' to
   9 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
  10 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
  11 Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
  12 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually.  I concluded
  13 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
  14 decided to see if I could automate it.  I came up with this small
  15 script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
  16
  17 <p><blockquote><pre>
  18 #!/bin/sh
  19 #
  20 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
  21 # upgradable package in one lump.  Fetching packages to upgrade using
  22 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
  23 # flag for manual/automatic.
  24
  25 set -e
  26
  27 ignore() {
  28     if [ "$1" ]; then
  29         grep -v "$1"
  30     else
  31         cat
  32     fi
  33 }
  34
  35 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
  36     echo "Upgrading $p"
  37     apt clean
  38     apt install --download-only -y $p
  39     for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
  40         if [ -e "$f" ]; then
  41             dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
  42             break
  43         fi
  44     done
  45 done
  46 </pre></blockquote></p>
  47
  48 <p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
  49 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
  50 downloaded packages using dpkg.  The idea is to upgrade packages
  51 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
  52 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency).  To
  53 use it, simply run it as root from the command line.  If it fail, try
  54 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again.  This
  55 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
  56 packages.  dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
  57
  58 <p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
  59 upgrade.  The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
  60 the packages that are simply too large to unpack.  Today this was
  61 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
  62 problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
  63
  64 <p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
  65 alternative ways to handle this.  The "unattended-upgrades
  66 --minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
  67 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
  68 first.  It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
  69 Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
  70 the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
  71
  72 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  73 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  74 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>