This one time, at band camp, Noah Meyerhans said: > Are we really going to ship etch without initrd-tools? If one follows > the upgrade instructions in the release notes, there will be a > significant period of time when no kernel is present on their machine, > or else they'll abort the upgrade when presented with > > You are running a kernel (version $running) and attempting to remove > the same version. This is a potentially disastrous action. Not only > will /boot/vmlinuz-$running be removed, making it impossible to boot > it, (you will have to take action to change your boot loader to boot > a new kernel), it will also remove all modules under the directory > /lib/modules/$running. Just having a copy of the kernel image is not > enough, you will have to replace the modules too. > > I repeat, this is very dangerous. If at all in doubt, answer no. If > you know exactly what you are doing, and are prepared to hose your > system, then answer Yes. > > We shouldn't be showing that message to users under normal, expected > circumstances. Our options would seem to be to revise the release > notes to no longer suggest upgrading aptitude before dist-upgrade, or > including an initrd-tools package that doesn't conflict with current > libc6. I believe we should include an initrd-tools package, even if > it is just a dummy package, to provide for a smooth upgrade path. I have seen no reply to this message as yet, either from the kernel-team (the putative maintainers of the initrd-tools package) or from the release team. I just did a dist-upgrade from sarge to etch yesterday, and I can confirm that a normal upgrade of a system with a minimal package set resulted in apt attempting to remove all versions of kernels installed. What can I do to help? Upload a dummy initrd-tools package? NMU glibc with this change reverted? Something else? This really will be a show stopper for most people. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ,''`. Stephen Gran | | : :' : sgran@debian.org | | `. `' Debian user, admin, and developer | | `- http://www.debian.org | -----------------------------------------------------------------
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