I posted earlier this week about some problems I had after doing: aptitude update && aptitude upgrade
on a Sarge system. It required rebooting and was immediately unbootable -- ON SARGE!!! This is the very stuff I am using stable to avoid! I lost a day tracking it down and finally found that when a kernel image is updated, update-grub is run. Normally when apt/dpkg or whatever part of apt actually upgrades a program and needs to update a config file, it gives you a choice of updating or sticking with the old file, or, at the very least, gives you a prompt and warns you of the change. However, when a kernel image is updated, it does not do ANY of these things. It doesn't warn you to back up the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, it doesn't back it up itself, and it does not, in any way, let you know it is doing this. I know some users know every detail of their systems, but I can't do that. I have a business to run and I started using Debian Stable because it is supposed to not mess with things when it upgrades. I could not find anything warning me of this. It turns out there is documentation in updategrub's man file that I have since used to make sure the options I've put in the list of boot kernels is kept, but through testing, I've seen updategrub will wipe out all entries for other kernels not the current root partition (and this happens whenever apt upgrades the kernel image). Considering that the intent of stable is to make it so reliable one can upgrade and count on the system continuing to work well, I cannot see how this lack of warning (and not making a backup) as anything other than a serious bug. It could be easily fixed by prompting the user with a warning menu.lst is about to be overwritten, so there's time to back it up. Even better the standard prompt for whether or not to overwrite a config file would be nice, since it would let the user decide to update menu.lst or not (or maybe back it up). Is this not a bug? Was I just supposed to somehow know that out of all the packages out there, this was a specific behavior in upgrading the kernel? It makes me wonder how many other exceptions are out there that I don't know about that could crash my system next time I upgrade. Do others feel a prompt would be appropriate in this case? I'd like to hear feedback before I submit it as a bug, since there may be some good reasons for doing this, however, I cannot imagine a single good reason for overwriting a file this important without at least telling the user/admin that it is happening. Hal -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
