[Bug 1783044] Re: grub-efi-amd64 postinst fails to install GRUB if /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/ is not present

[Daniel Richard G.]

My understanding is that grub-pc conflicts with grub-efi-amd64 (and
other top-level GRUB packages), so having both installed shouldn't even
be possible. (I've filed a bug report on the Debian side to address
this, as this situation is not ideal: https://bugs.debian.org/904062)
And that if you want the GRUB installation tools, but don't want the
bootloader installed automatically on the running system, then this is
when you'd install a grub-foo-bin package without the corresponding
grub-foo.

My point was just that the "Don't install to the EFI removable media
path" question is not orthogonal to your hypothetical "Create an EFI
subdirectory?" question, so maybe the solution would be to replace the
former with some kind of multi-choice question.

** Bug watch added: Debian Bug tracker #904062
   https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=904062

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1783044

Title:
  grub-efi-amd64 postinst fails to install GRUB if /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/
  is not present

Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  This concerns grub-efi-amd64 2.02-2ubuntu8.1 in Ubuntu 18.04/bionic.

  When the grub-efi-amd64 package is initially installed on a system
  that has not previously booted via the Ubuntu EFI bootloader (so
  /boot/efi/ is either empty, or at least does not have a
  /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/ directory), the package postinst script fails to
  install anything into /boot/efi/.

  The postinst script, in fact, contains this conditional around the
  grub-install invocation:

      if [ "$bootloader_id" ] && [ -d "/boot/efi/EFI/$bootloader_id" ];
  then

  It's not clear why this is here. There might be a reason why you would
  not want to install/update the bootloader if the directory for it
  isn't already there. In my case, however, I am running the postinst
  script (via dpkg-reconfigure) precisely to populate an EFI partition
  from scratch.

  I can work around this issue with a simple

      # mkdir -p /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu

  before running dpkg-reconfigure, but this is far from obvious.

  An additional problem with the conditional is that if it fails, no
  message is given to the user that the postinst is omitting the GRUB
  install, let alone the reason why. If the user misses the absence of
  the grub-install message, they'll only find out something went wrong
  when they attempt to boot using the newly-installed bootloader and it
  doesn't work.

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