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Bug#383600: behaviour of update-initramfs -u has changed, only updates latest kernel initrd



maximilian attems wrote:
> first of all this not serious,
> update-initramfs -u doesn't update _all_ initramfs
> and it never did. so this bug report is bogus.
> 

Mea culpa! You are right, update-initramfs -u never updated all
initramfs (only your last email made this clear to me).
I'm not quite sure anymore how I came to this conclusion. It probably
happened, because I use two initrd enabled kernels, a 2.6.18-rc testing
 kernel and a stable 2.6.17 kernel, which I use as default.
I was experimenting with uswsusp some time ago and after an upgrade of
initramfs-tools, I noticed that upon calling update-initramfs -u it
didn't update my 2.6.17 (which I was running) initrd anymore but the
2.6.18-rc initrd. Now that I think of it (and I hope I'm not wrong again
this time) you changed the behaviour from updating the running initrd to
updating the latest initrd, and from this I somehow drew the wrong
conclusion that before this change, all initrds were updated. I can only
remember that from one day to the other things were behaving differently
regarding update-initramfs. Sorry for the noise.

Though I think my point is still valid.
IMHO it would be correct to apply (security) updates of packages like
udev to all installed kernels, because you can't know which kernel
actually is the default kernel on a system.
Your standpoint is that people are supposed to only run the latest
kernel. But what if someone installs linux-image-486 and linux-image-686
kernel? Both are supported by Debian (your argument that old unames are
not supported does not hold here) but you can't know for sure that 686
is the kernel that the user runs.
It surely is not such a common use case, still it happened to me. So my
bug report was indeed meant serious. I'm only sorry that I phrased my
problem poorly.
I'd find it pretty handy if update-initramfs -u, given that it detects
that more than one kernel is installed, would give me the choice which
initrd is updated. Could be a low prio question and only shown if
currently running kernel != latest installed kernel.
Guess this qualifies for a wishlist bug then, I'll leave that up to you.

Cheers,
Michael

-- 
Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
universe are pointed away from Earth?

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