smart package manager oddities

[Stefan Grosse]

Hi,

I was trying to clean up my system. When I was running kdirstat I
discovered that the smart package manager consumed 30 percent of my
disk space since it seems to create a huge file in /var/lib/channels at
every channel update. (140 MB for fedora-development)

I reported the bug in smart/launchpad:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/smart/+bug/319965

Can someone confirm this problem?

Unfortunately removing smart does not remove those files. So I have to
manually remove them. Why is yum not cleaning completely?

Cheers
Stefan

[Seth Vidal]

On Thu, 2009-01-22 at 11:06 +0100, Stefan Grosse wrote:
>  Hi,
>  
>  I was trying to clean up my system. When I was running kdirstat I
>  discovered that the smart package manager consumed 30 percent of my
>  disk space since it seems to create a huge file in /var/lib/channels at
>  every channel update. (140 MB for fedora-development)
>  
>  I reported the bug in smart/launchpad:
>  https://bugs.launchpad.net/smart/+bug/319965
>  
>  Can someone confirm this problem?
>  
>  Unfortunately removing smart does not remove those files. So I have to
>  manually remove them. Why is yum not cleaning completely? 
yum is not cleaning completely? Or do you mean smart is not cleaning
completely?

-sv

[Stefan Grosse]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:18:11 -0500 seth vidal
<skvidal(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
SV> > Unfortunately removing smart does not remove those files. So I
SV> > have to manually remove them. Why is yum not cleaning completely?

SV> yum is not cleaning completely? Or do you mean smart is not cleaning
SV> completely?

Sorry when I was not that clear. The bug in smart caused the contents
of /var/lib/smart/channels to grow especially with the
fedora-development-channel. This is because smart did not clean up
properly.

Now I thought that when I use yum to remove smart, it (yum) would
 clean/delete the files in /var/lib/smart/ as well. This was not the
 case. But maybe this is intentional? I am not an expert. 

In my case this leftover of smart was just a bit large (5GB) ...

Stefan

PS It seems that this smart bug is a duplicate and was fixed today
upstream.

[Kevin Kofler]

Stefan Grosse wrote:
>  Now I thought that when I use yum to remove smart, it (yum) would
>   clean/delete the files in /var/lib/smart/ as well. This was not the
>   case. But maybe this is intentional? I am not an expert. 
Removing a package does not remove files created at runtime by the software
contained in the package (except if the preuninstall or postuninstall
script of the package removes them, but in general it doesn't), only files
contained in the package itself.

        Kevin Kofler

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Kevin Kofler wrote:
>  Stefan Grosse wrote:
> > Now I thought that when I use yum to remove smart, it (yum) would
> >  clean/delete the files in /var/lib/smart/ as well. This was not the
> >  case. But maybe this is intentional? I am not an expert.
>  
>  Removing a package does not remove files created at runtime by the software
>  contained in the package (except if the preuninstall or postuninstall
>  script of the package removes them, but in general it doesn't), only files
>  contained in the package itself.
>   
This could be a packaging problem in smart.  If the files have
predictable names and don't contain non-replacable content then it might
need to %ghost them.  Not being a smart user, though, I don't know if
that's the case with these files or not.  If you're using the smart
package from Fedora you might want to open a bug against the package
here as well.

-Toshio

[Bill Crawford]

On Thursday 22 January 2009 12:56:23 Stefan Grosse wrote:

>  Sorry when I was not that clear. The bug in smart caused the
> contents
>  of /var/lib/smart/channels to grow especially with the
>  fedora-development-channel. This is because smart did not clean up
>  properly. 
...
>  In my case this leftover of smart was just a bit large (5GB) ...
Sounds like a side-effect of the change to use different filenames with the 
content hash in for the metadata. Smart will need modifying to throw those away 
once they are no longer needed ...