Bug#353809: initramfs-tools: Silently destroys yaird initrd image on package update

[Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk>]

Package: initramfs-tools
Version: 0.52b
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks unrelated software

I have both initramfs-tools and yaird installed on my system.

Yaird is explicitly defined as the default to use in /etc/kernel-img.conf.

Updating to initramfs-tools an hour ago my yaird-generated initrd image
was silently overwritten with an image generated by initramfs-tools.

That's BAD!


I believe the best long-term solution to this is for a separately packaged
kernel-install-helper tool to be considered the owner of initrd images,
instead of each ramdisk-generator trying to be smart about them.

I believe best approach to a kernel-install-helper is for Manoj to find
time to move the kernel-package maintainer scripts out into such tool.


Until then I see no sane way of non-interactively replacing initrd images
not created by same package.


 - Jonas

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (100, 'experimental')
Architecture: powerpc (ppc)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-1-powerpc
Locale: LANG=da_DK, LC_CTYPE=da_DK (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages initramfs-tools depends on:
ii  busybox                       1:1.01-4   Tiny utilities for small and embed
ii  cpio                          2.6-10     GNU cpio -- a program to manage ar
ii  klibc-utils                   1.2.2-3    small statically-linked utilities 
ii  udev                          0.084-5    /dev/ and hotplug management daemo

initramfs-tools recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information