$MAXPACKAGES

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:12:07 +0100, Steffen Grunewald <steffen.grunewald at aei.mpg.de> said:

    > Reducing MAXPACKAGES to 150 resulted in package counts going up to 324, but
    > the installation finally succeeded.
    > I have set MAXPACKAGES to 100 for future installs now, to be on the safe side,
    > but I'm still worried - is this behaviour intentional? 
Yes.


    > From a naive point of
    > view, I'd expect the installer to cut the package list into chunks of 
    > maximally $MAXPACKAGES items, even after resolving
    > dependencies... 
Since the fai script install_packages does not care about dependencies
(that is done by apt-get or aptitude) it cannot limit the number of
packages after resolving dependencies.

    > What would happen if there was an "include everything for a certain project"
    > metapackage? Would even MAXPACKAGES=1 (or close to 1) fail to install?
Maybe. AFAIK, the package manager has no way to check if there's
enough space in /var/cache/apt/archives. Best way is, to ensure that
/var has enough space for downloading all packages.

-- 
regards Thomas