[Reportbug-maint] Bug#433462: Suggestions to fix #433462 (add free space info to reportbug)

[Goswin von Brederlow]

Sandro Tosi <morph at debian.org> writes:

> Hi all,
> in bug #433462 there is a request to add free space information in
> reportbug standard info appended to bug report.
>
> It's a valid request, that I want to fulfill, but there are some
> aspects I'd like to discuss.

If the software can not write data because the filesystem is full then
it should give a meaningfull error message. An error message containing
the location and "No space left on device" should be sufficiently
obvious to either the reportee or maintainer to diagnose the problem
without any free space information.

On the other hand including free space information will be difficult to
handle properly and possibly expose information the user considers
private.


But if you do go ahead with this consider this:

The bugreport gives the following argument: "I suspect that a lot of my
packages would fail in mysterious ways if the root partition was full."
How will his software behave with the root partition being mounted
read-only? Listing the free space on root or /usr would be completly
meaningless if they are read-only and writing to them would be a
critical bug anyway.

The only places where a normal application should write to are /tmp and
$HOME. Those could be included by default. Some packages (daemons
mostly) could further need /var/. But I would think most packages would
not be interested in that. Any other place I would think is completly
application specific and should be included only on the applications
request.

MfG
        Goswin