Kevin J. Cummings:
>> Preupgrade should know about the limitation and refuse to run the
>> upgrade if insufficient ram exists in the system instead of waiting
>> for the reboot where it just hangs with no explanation....

Rahul Sundaram:
> "Should know" is true in the ideal sense.  However it is far from easy
> to determine in advance however.  Even now, the amount of memory used
> is given as a range instead of a specific value because of these
> reasons.  The only thing possible is to document it and the obvious
> place which is the download page already has been updated.

I don't really agree.

It will be known that at least some minimum is required (to do a minimal
install), probably a higher minimum is required (to do one of the
prepared list of packages; of which they can be assessed, having fixed
numbers of packages), and it should be possible to calculate the highest
minimum (kitchen sink installs).  And the install routine ought to be
able to do a memory count and fire up an appropriate memory warning *as*
*you* *pick* which type of install to do (whether that be "insufficient
memory" or "probably insufficient memory"), not simply abort ten minutes
or more into churning through package lists trying to work out
dependencies.

This reminds me of the crap we (users) had to go through in the 1980s,
fiddling around with stack sizes, trying to get some programs to run
because the programmer was crap.  All we could do was experimentally
keep increasing the value, trying to get one that would work, pot luck.
Since we had no idea how the program worked, there was no way we could
have worked out the right value.

Another thing that springs to mind:  The memory requirements to install
have often been higher than what was required to actually run the
installed system.  That smacks of bad programming, in itself.

-- 
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.



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