Bug#271699: kernel-image-2.4.26-1-686: update does not run lilo

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 03:02:14PM +0200, Marc Glisse wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Horms wrote:
> 
> > > was to reboot immediatly. I think it might be a good idea to at least add
> > > a clear warning that people still using lilo should run lilo before
> > > rebooting, because the upgrade leaves the machine in an unbootable state
> > > for them.
> >
> > That sounds very reasonable to me. Would you like to redraft the message?
> 
> Sadly enough, my native language is not english, so I am not sure this is
> a good idea. But anyway, it just needs an added line like:
> "** WARNING: if your bootloader is lilo, don't forget to run 'lilo' once
> the installation is complete, otherwise you may not be able to reboot"
> (that is for an upgrade or a removal. For a new installation, it should be
> "otherwise you will still be booting your old kernel")
> 
> I don't know if there is a way to detect whether lilo is the bootloader
> (never looked into it), but in this case a dialog/readline interface might
> ask the question whether you want to run lilo now, with the same warning.

I believe that a generic boot-loader package, which would hold this kind of
info for all arches may be a good idea. It would ask you what bootloader you
want to use, and verify that the package is correctly installed (obviously,
you can't depend on them, or you need to have all of them installed, maybe an
apt-get install call in the postinst or some other such trick would be
possible though).

Then detecting the boot loader would be as easy as querying the debconf
database for this value.

Friendly,

Sven Luther