[Aptitude-devel] Bug#887732: non-root user sacrifices half of disk to download one little package

[積丹尼 Dan Jacobson]

Package: aptitude
Version: 0.8.10-6

With plenty of disk space,

jidanni1 at ps11007:/tmp$ df .
Filesystem     1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
none              131072  2976    128096   3% /tmp

our regular (non-root) user thinks "I'll use the power of aptitude to
download a package and any other required packages!"

jidanni1 at ps11007:/tmp$ aptitude -o Debug::NoLocking=true -o Dir::Cache=/tmp --download-only install libbest-perl
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libbest-perl
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 15.0 kB of archives. After unpacking 65.5 kB will be used.
Get: 1 http://mirror.newdream.net/ubuntu/ trusty/universe libbest-perl all 0.15-1 [15.0 kB]
Fetched 15.0 kB in 0s (1,096 kB/s)

"Hmmm, 15.0 kB, 65.5 kB, whatever. OK Good."

jidanni1 at ps11007:/tmp$ df .
Filesystem     1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
none              131072 60280     70792  46% /tmp

"Holy smokes, what happened? It ate half my disk space!"

jidanni1 at ps11007:/tmp$ ls -Sog|head
-rw-r--r-- 1 29352344 01-19 21:19 pkgcache.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 29311314 01-19 21:19 srcpkgcache.bin

"What do you want me to do, not set Dir?"

jidanni1 at ps11007:/tmp$ aptitude -o Debug::NoLocking=true --download-only install libbest-perl
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libbest-perl
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 15.0 kB of archives. After unpacking 65.5 kB will be used.
Err http://mirror.newdream.net/ubuntu/ trusty/universe libbest-perl all 0.15-1
  Could not open file /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/libbest-perl_0.15-1_all.deb - open (13: Permission denied)
0% [Working]E: Failed to fetch http://mirror.newdream.net/ubuntu/pool/universe/libb/libbest-perl/libbest-perl_0.15-1_all.deb: Could not open file /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/libbest-perl_0.15-1_all.deb - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Some files failed to download

"All I wanted was one measly package."

"Now I have to clean up the mess left behind each time."

(Same problem with current Debian aptitude.)

Anyway do document on the man page, at --download-only, do document all
the things non-root people need to do...