On 27.06.2016 15:45, Ben Hutchings wrote:
Control: tag -1 wontfix
On Mon, 2016-06-27 at 15:20 +0300, Evgeny Kapun wrote:
On 27.06.2016 15:03, Ben Hutchings wrote:
Doesn't lilo fail if a file specified in its configuration is
missing?
Ben.
LILO has an "optional" option which makes it skip an entry if either
the kernel or the initrd file is missing (or is a broken link).
That's a good point.
I checked whether liloconfig would put the 'optional' keyword in
/etc/lilo.conf, but the config file it generated didn't mention the
symlinks at all. So I don't think it makes sense to assume that people
use the 'optional' keyword.
There are other boot loaders that I think will use the symlinks during
package updates: elilo, palo and zipl. They all have similar
configuration syntax to lilo, but it appears that elilo and palo do not
support the 'optional' keyword.
Although the 'old' symlinks will sometimes be redundant, I don't think
this issue outweighs the inconvenience of a failed boot loader update.
Ben.
On the other hand, the current behavior (when both pairs of symlinks are always
kept) was introduced not so long ago, so most existing setups should work with
the old behavior. And I can't find anyone reporting the old behavior as a bug,
so I think that the old behavior isn't actually any more problematic than the
current one. Maybe add a config option to choose between the old and the
current behavior?
Also, if keeping all these symlinks is so important, then maintainer scripts
should always prevent the only remaining installed kernel version from being
removed, since there is no way to have valid symlinks after that. Now, such
removal would proceed without any confirmation (unless that version happens to
be the same as the one that is currently running), and all symlinks will be
removed.
