On 26-12-2016 02:54, Eli Schwartz via arch-general wrote: > On 12/24/2016 10:33 AM, Mauro Santos via arch-general wrote: >> What other distros do is recommend a 1GB /boot or changing the >> configuration to reduce the number of older kernels installed[1]. People >> have complained about small libraries needing to be installed as being >> wasteful, at a grand total 100MiB+ for each kernel that would start a >> nice flamewar. > > Well, we already expect people to take care of orphans themselves, and > nobody is suggesting old kernels *must* be kept around forever. > >>>> There is also the matter of automagic bootloader configuration change to >>>> support that, not to mention people that use efistub to boot their >>>> system, how do you propose to handle that? > > The blatantly obvious way would be with a dummy kernel package > containing a symlink to the vmlinuz/initramfs of the latest versioned > package. Old bootloader configurations don't care about how many new and > irrelevant files aren't being looked at. > > If you want new bootloader entries to be automatically added in grub.cfg > then simply use a pacman hook to re-run grub-mkconfig -- I am sure > something similar can be easily done for syslinux/EFI. > You can also edit the boot cmdline from grub itself... > Automagic updates? No thank you. Stay away from my configuration files and efi variables. >>> If you have installed archlinux, it's reasonable to expect that one knows >>> how to configure this. >> >> It is you who said "I wish arch would (like other distros) keep 2 or >> three old kernel versions around" not me. Other distributions >> automagically take care of updating the bootloader configuration, as >> much would be expected of arch. >> Some people already have trouble managing to update one kernel properly, >> imagine the chaos it would be with more than one if manual steps were >> involved, not to mention old kernels have _known_ security issues and >> having old stuff around is not the Arch way. > > What problems are people having with updating one kernel? Please > elaborate on your vagueness. > Forgetting to reboot, which you address below and I have to agree that as things are now they are not optimal. Forgetting to mount /boot and all the "fun" stuff that every once in a while pops up in the forum. > As for known security issues and keeping old stuff around, I could care > less about offering all kernels in the repos -- I just don't want my old > kernel to be uninstalled until I say so. > > See http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16702 for more details, but the basic > gist is that versioned kernel installs are a *good* thing, as opposed to > being forced to reboot every time your --sysupgrade includes the kernel > (which is what *I* would call not-very-Arch-way), and it is intended > that we will eventually get versioned kernels, and the fact that we > don't have that today is simply because it is low-priority and tpowa > hasn't gotten around to it yet. > > (I am not entirely sure what the holdup is, though.) > -- Mauro Santos