Re: don't upgrade grub or grub-pc ! what's wrong with LILO ?
On Tue, 2 Feb 2010 12:59:31 -0500 (EST), Tom Furie wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 10:47:17AM -0500, Stephen Powell wrote:
>> On Tue, 2 Feb 2010 09:18:30 -0500 (EST), Tom Furie wrote:
>>> One option would be to boot from a CD (installer, liveCD, whatever),
>>> chroot into Debian and revert grub to an earlier version.
>>
>> As has been addressed in other recent posts, downgrading a package
>> to a previous version once a newer version has been installed
>> is unsupported and often difficult. If there is a different package
>> that performs the same function, it is usually easier to deinstall
>> the problem package and install the alternative package in its place.
>> Laying my personal biases aside and considering the problem as
>> objectively as I can, I would recommend installing an alternate
>> bootloader, if possible, rather than attempting to downgrade the
>> existing bootloader. But each user must decide for himself what
>> works best in his situation.
>
> In general I agree with you, but in this case it should be fairly
> trivial since very little depends on grub, and the dependencies between
> the versions haven't changed, to purge the current version and install
> an earlier one. I know, for example that 1.98~20100126-1 still works.
If you can *find* it, yes. For example, if you are running "sid", and
a new upload breaks, you may be able to find an older version in
"testing" that still works. But if you are running "testing" and an
upload breaks, where are you going to find a down-level version that
you can install? The version in "stable" was probably compiled with
a back-level C compiler and may require a back-level C run-time
library, etc. If you have backups of your /var/cache/apt/archives/
directory, you may be able to find a .deb package file for a
downlevel release. But in my case I run "aptitude clean" after
each upgrade to free disk space. If I were running grup-pc and
testing, and a migration of a grub-pc package from sid to testing
caused my system to be unbootable, I don't know where I would even
be able to *find* a downlevel .deb package to install from, especially
if it had been more than a few days between the migration from sid
to testing and when I ran my upgrade. By then, all the mirrors would
have updated.
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