Updater can't update kernel due to disk space

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On 15 January 2015 at 21:04, Adam Conrad <adconrad at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 10:49:42AM -0600, Dustin Kirkland wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 9:12 AM, Adam Conrad <adconrad at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>
>> > I can see several ways "power users" can shoot themselves in the foot
>> > with autoremove, but no way that "normal people" can, and I'm not sure
>> > catering to people who think they're clever doing unclever things is
>> > the right default.
>>
>> Autoremoving kernels, when you have lots of them, and as long as you
>> keep your current one (and one other known good one), should be very
>> safe, for almost any user.
>
> Right, kernel autoremoval is always safe.  Where people can shoot
> themselves in the foot (assuming automatic autoremove) is the following
> sort of scenario:
>
> 1) Corporate IT dept distributes end-user bundle of apps by way of a
>    private repo consisting of all apps, and a company-meta package that
>    depends on them.
>
> 2) The company-meta package isn't in the "metapackages" section (which
>    apt treats specially).
>
> 3) User (with root, so already a small subset) removes "company-meta"
>
> 4) On the next autoremove, all the company apps are removed.
>
> This scenario is a non-issue for the Ubuntu archive, we treat our meta
> packages correctly, and install things in a way that removing the meta
> should do no harm.
>
> Ultimately, I think optimising for the fear of autoremove causing harm
> is the wrong thing at this point, and we're better off doing the cruft
> removal.  This isn't just about kernels (though, they're the huge thing
> people notice), but also old libraries you no longer need, etc.

Can auto-remove accept a pattern of things to remove? E.g. apt
autoremove linux-*

Imho:

dist-upgrader should remove old kernels during clean-up stage (it does
a few cleanup tasks already)

update-manager should actually invoke autoremove linux-* when things
fail due to out-of-disk space on /boot, at the moment it pops up a
dialog with suggestion to run autoremove.

if automatic updates are enabled(apt upgrade, not full-upgrade) it
should be safe to run autoremove linux-* as well.
Or just give better instructions that one should enable autoremove as
well. (periodic apt supports it).

-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.