Thanks for the information. Your questions are probably rhetorical, but I've responded anyway, below :)
On Fri 31 Jul 2020 at 11:21:06 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:
........
> When I did the upgrade the terminal showed
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Setting up grub-pc (2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u1) ...
> Installing for i386-pc platform.
> Installation finished. No error reported.
> Generating grub configuration file ...
> --------------------------------
> The second line suggests an installation happened, though it's not clear.
It is abundantly clear. What else could be meant?
That a debian package has been installed. The grub.cfg was updated. That some files somewhere other than my boot sector have been updated.
> In particular, it doesn't mention any particular installation location.
Why should it?
So I can tell what has been updated, having more than one disk. If I interpret the script and config options correctly, it might even be possible to have it update more than one location automatically. Also, giving the installation location would lessen the ambiguity referred to above.
I think the problem is that the messages (I'm guessing lines 2 and 3 in my excerpt above are from grub-install) are designed in the context of invoking grub-install from the command line, in which case further information would be pointless. But when it's invoked in the context of a Debian package upgrade, the context is less evident.
Ross