Re: Bug#396331: upgrade-reports: sarge to etch removes kernels
Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 03:04:49PM -0800, Kevin B. McCarty wrote:
>> Sorry, maybe I didn't make myself understood well, or else I didn't
>> understand the bug report. If I read correctly, the submitter is
>> complaining that his dist-upgrade wanted to remove the package
>> containing the **currently running** kernel.
>
> That's correct.
>
>> Wouldn't that be a problem??
>
> Yes, but how do you think the new aptitude is going to fix it?
By always considering linux-image-* to be manually installed, apparently:
aptitude (0.4.4-1) unstable; urgency=low
[snip]
- Change the default settings to leave unused Linux kernel
images on the system. (Closes: #386307)
(Sorry, it wasn't clear to me whether that was a rhetorical question or
not.)
Hmm, I looked at #386307 and apparently the kernel-image-* packages
themselves have a method to prevent removal of a running kernel. It's
not nearly as nice as a fix in aptitude would be, though; it just
amounts to a scary question in the kernel prerm script, "Remove the
running kernel image?". (This question is not even debconf'ized in the
Sarge kernels.) If one answers no (the default), the removal fails.
(For further confusion later, in the Etch kernel packages, the
corresponding Debconf question has the sense of the yes/no answer
reversed ...)
If aptitude is trying to do a lot of other things in the same run, as is
typical in a dist-upgrade, the kernel package prerm failure may leave
many other packages temporarily unconfigured, and the user will probably
have to re-run the operation after marking the old kernel-image package
as not to be removed.
> Why *should* aptitude try to fix it?
IMO, the benefits of users not having to see the scary kernel removal
message, answer the right thing to it, and then have to re-run aptitude
after explicitly marking the old kernel package to remain installed,
outweigh the annoyance of having old kernel packages remain installed on
their systems. If you disagree, though, I doubt I can say anything to
change your mind. Then I guess the release notes should be adjusted to
suggest the best order of operations.
However the release note change suggested by the original submitter of
this bug doesn't seem to help the situation any. Tested on my sarge system:
> benjo[1]:/home/kmccarty# vim /etc/apt/sources.list
[add line for etch]
> benjo[2]:/home/kmccarty# apt-get update
[...]
> benjo[3]:/home/kmccarty# aptitude -f install linux-image-2.6-k7
[...]
> The following packages will be REMOVED:
[...]
> initrd-tools kernel-image-2.6.8-3-k7 lapack-dev lesstif2-dev
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
[...]
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
> Abort.
> benjo[4]:/home/kmccarty# uname -a
> Linux benjo 2.6.8-3-k7 #1 Thu Sep 7 05:09:40 UTC 2006 i686 GNU/Linux
^^^^^^^^^^
So that's not going to work so well.
(There's also an issue with libfam0/libfam0c102 that I'll report as a
separate bug to upgrade-reports.)
best regards,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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