Re: The necessity of running depmod at boot time

[Clifford Beshers <clifford.beshers@linspire.com>]

Joey Hess wrote:

Marco d'Itri wrote:
  

If we can agree that it's not needed anymore (i.e. mandate by policy
that packages need to run depmod on their own) then I will be happy to
remove it from the m-i-t init script.
    

A while back Debian would only run depmod on boot if it had not been run
before since the last kernel upgrade. Could you refresh my memory about
why that optimisation was dropped?
  

I don't believe that it was.  Looking at the code in sid, I see a call to 'depmod --quick'.  That is supposed to compare timestamps on files to determine if depmod needs to be run in full.  Presumably then, you should get at most one boot that runs depmod after a kernel change, but it sounds like Margarita is seeing a full run of depmod every time.

We saw that in Linspire at one point, but I had thought it was something we had introduced, not inherited.  There were two entities that were making sure things were up-to-date, and the second one was modifying files on every boot after depmod had gone around and regenerated everything, creating a vicious circle.

If that is happening, then you may find that the 'depmod --quick' is fine once that is fixed.