On Tue, 4 Jul 2017 09:49:10 -0400
Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???> wrote:

> 6GB is a ridiculous amount of space. I wonder how much of it yo
> really needed. Could some other people report how much /tmp space
> they had available during successful or failed jessie->ascii upgrades?


Out of curiosity, I temporarily sed'ed my desktop's sources.list (which
contains some non-devuan lines like deb-multimedia and emdebian) from
jessie to ascii for a "dry run":

  $ df -h | grep sda
  /dev/sda3            12G  8.6G  1.1G  89% /
  /dev/sda1           113M   23M   87M  21% /boot
  /dev/sda4            60G   26G   32G  45% /home

$ apt-get update && apt-get -s dist-upgrade
[...]
1895 upgraded, 398 newly installed, 98 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 2,064 MB of archives.
After this operation, 1,135 MB of additional disk space will be used.
[...]

IIUC, apt unpacks the archives "on the fly" - so in my case of a quite
lightweight but well equipped desktop system, the upgrade to ascii would
need more than 3GB of free disk space: about 2GB (temporarily)
in /var/cache/apt/archives/ to download the .debs plus >1.1GB for ascii
itself, probably the very most of it in /usr/.

With limited disk space, it can help to first "upgrade" and then
"dist-upgrade" in a second step, after deleting the content
of /var/cache/apt/archives/ folder (the downloaded .debs).

An other possibility could be to "mount -o bind" a directory on some
other partition or (thumb)drive to /var/cache/apt/archives/ for the
duration of the dist-upgrade.

libre Grüße,

Florian