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Re: What to expect following major update



Harry Putnam wrote:
> I haven't kept boot mounted for yrs, and I hadn't noticed that grub
> was to be updated... there was 187 pgks, further its not automatically
> apparent that grub.cfg resides on boot... not all of grubs files do.
> I'm very new to grub2.
> 
> But even with that, yes, it was sloppy not to catch it, but isn't that
> just the kind of place where a warning of some kind might be well
> placed.

It is okay if you want to keep your /boot not mounted and only mount
it when needed.  That's fine.  But I think it is your responsibililty
to do it that way if that is what you want to do.

There are an infinite number of possible local customizations.  Your
local customization to keep /boot not mounted is simply one of an
infinite number of local customizations that might cause problems.  It
isn't possible for any package to handle an infinite number of
possibilies.  They are only expected to handle "normal" systems.
Therefore if you are doing that type of special thing then I think it
is your responsibilty to own that problem entirely and make sure it is
mounted when the package scripts need it.

This is just the same as keeping / read-only most of the time and
enabling it only during installation.  You could probably benefit from
the dpkg configuration to automatically mount and umount /boot as
needed.

  http://wiki.debian.org/ReadonlyRoot

Look for "Make apt-get remount / if needed" for the configuration
there and it should be simple to adapt it for your /boot needs.

I think the number of users who keep a read-only / is probably larger
in number than the ones who don't mount /boot so I would queue up
behind the read-only root folks.  If they ever get those changes into
a standard system installation then you could start pushing to have an
empty /boot into the next set of changes.  :-)

> After all, its nearly a sure bet that if there are no files in /boot,
> it is not mounted, that is, on a running OS doing an online update.
> 
> Many many linux users keep boot umounted.  In fact I believe there was
> a time when it was common on debian.  I'm pretty sure last time I
> played with debian, which would have been 5-7 yrs ago it was recommended.

Hey, I will recommend a read-only root for all of those same reasons
of safety and cleanliness and so forth.  Go for it!  :-)  But that
doesn't make it the mainstream system.  At least not yet.  Perhaps in
time.  Until then you have to know what you are doing.

Bob

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