my system partition is as good as full
Hello. The primary thing to try would be freeing up space. I don’t
know, what is your experience, but people very often miss the growing
“/var/cache/pacman/pkg” directory. Even well-maintained it consumes a lot.
Other than that, see the extra/ncdu package. Run it as sudo in
read-only mode (for safety) to find the biggest offenders:
sudo ncdu -xr
so I wonder if there is a safe method to install packages to alternative locations. The packages in question are android-studio-system and android-ndk.
Short answer: NO. Pacman packages are not just collections of files
to be installed. They represent a subset of data as if it was already
installed in the root file system.
Longer answer: you may build your own version of packages with
different options, including the installation root. This can be done
either using ABS⁽¹⁾ or by manually downloading the relevant PKGBUILD
(see package’s page, box on the right), modifying options and using
`makepkg`.
You may also build them and install directly from sources yourself,
without `makepkg` and `pacman`. The will go to “/usr/local” then, your
own home directory or any other location not managed by pacman. Note
that in this case it *must* be a location not managed by pacman or you
will face conflicts.
The last two paragraphs are describing building software by your own
and, by doing so, you will no longer receive updates for this software
while doing `pacman -Syu`, you will be responsible for updating and
rebuilding it, and resolving conflicts and bugs.
____
⁽¹⁾ https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ABS
