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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