Dnf system-upgrade, package location

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Hi all,

I wanted to upgrade my F41 to F42 using dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=....

In previous releases, at least afair, the packages were saved to /var/lib/dnf/system-upgrade, which was fine for me, because I have a rather big /var volume.

Now I found that with F41→F42 the system-upgrade saves the packages to /usr/lib/sysimage/libdnf5/offline, filling up my / volume, so that I end up with lots of

  • installing package foobaz needs over9000MB more space on the / filesystem

When and why did that change? And how can I use /var for the downloaded upgrade files like in previous Fedora releases?

I found that dnf.conf(5)'s manpage mentions system_state_dir being set to /usr/lib/sysimage/libdnf5, but dnf5-system-state(7) doesn’t give me a good hint on whether or not this setting could be the right one and if it might be changed without fscking up the whole system. dnf5-offline(8) tells me it uses system_state_dir, though.

What can I do?

2

A very good question. It is a bug if you would ask me, but my opinion doesn’t count.

If you crate the symlink /usr/lib/sysimage/libdnf5/offline to point somewhere in the /var, you may be able to use the /var instead of /usr. I am not sure if that would work when you invoke the reboot. So you could be brave and try.

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3

Thanks. As I’m a little coward, I removed some packages before upgrading and installed them afterwards.