Re: Aptitude/Grub Problem -- Is this a bug?

[Andrei Popescu <andreimp@rdslink.ro>]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 17:19:19 -0500
Hal Vaughan <hal@thresholddigital.com> wrote:

[snip]
> Okay.  That's easy and makes sense.  But there is still a problem, but 
> may be more with grub.  I went through the man pages of grub and did a 
> lot of research to figure out how to make the changes I needed.  Not 
> once did I see this documented.  So there is basically a default 
> behavior to overwrite the file, but any documentation on how to prevent 
> changes from being overwritten is obscure.  This one incident has 
> really led me to question the overall stability of Stable and wonder 
> when another muck-up like this will happen because all the 
> documentation warning about such a default behavior is obscure.

update-grub is run on *every* kernel install/removal/upgrade and it has to. If you customize your menu.lst the file itself contains the indications on how to do this in order to keep the changes across updates. It has ways of specifying kernel options for all version or just for one subversion, which alternates to include for each kernel ... 

I do agree this can not be considered proper documented, but then again, update-grub is Debian specific and any grub docs don't know anything about it. I can't think of a better way to document this. If you file a bug I think it should be against whatever package contains update-grub. It probably should have a BIG warning that it is changing menu.lst, or at least make a back-up of the old file. The later would be trivial to implement.

Andrei
-- 
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. (Albert Einstein)