Apt-get

Apt-get update/upgrade is an excellent tool from Debian GNU/Linux, but sometimes you can have lots of problems when you have a limited amount of free space on your system.
From last week's upgrade on my Testing, I needed to download 150Mb of packages and afterwards 45Mb will be used. Postgresql data resides on a RAID out of / but I encountered problems with disk space, because
apt wanted to use the /var filesystem for migration dump.
Same problems two weeks ago for OpenOffice, while upgrade requested 60Mb for files & 25 more after upgrade, I was obliged to free up 250Mb only for a temp space during OpenOffice 1.1 upgrade. SuSE also have
some problems during YOU while they provide a kernel patch: when mkinitrd fails, it didn't tries again until success but returns to Yast. At first reboot, you're in trouble with GRUB and need a failsafe boot
+mkinitrd to solve it (if you have enough disk space).
These glitches took me time to solve and a little headache but when you add these time slices, you find yourself loosing half a day per two weeks, correcting small problems for +-10 Linux systems. Maybee dist
ributions should double-check the actions of their patch distibution systems in order for sysadmin to have a less life doom and lambda users to avoid bad suprises.
Just my 0.2