Root fs overflow. Updater tools must warn?

[Anthony Pankov]

Greetings.

Recently I've got a very bad experience with root filesystem (ufs) overflow.

I  was preparing to install some port and wanted to upgrade ports tree
(ports was on root fs).

I estimated free space that was 1Gb+.
Than I ran
portsnap fetch
portsnap extract

After some time server stoped responding.

On server reboot I see the fatal Error:
 "can't write, filesystem is full"
than kernel messages
 "can't allocate .. soft_.. dep ...
  system going to reboot"

  Rebooting in single user mode show the following:
-  fsck makes the Error;
-  make clean in ports  makes the Error;
-  removing snaphot makes the Error;
-  removing large file makes the Error;

The same was when booting from live cd.

It was very sad.

Of  course  I  think  this is my fault. But tools such as portsnap and
freebsd-update  always  running as root.  System can't preserve
fs  space as in case of unprivileged user. May be, tools that run from
root  and  do  the  fs  space consuming things must estimate available
space and stop in bad case?


-- 
Best regards,
 Anthony Pankov                          mailto:ap00 at mail.ru