Crash while upgrading kernel & stable releases

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 11:12:49AM +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:

> I updated one of my Hoary computer yesterday and, unfortunately, it
> crashed during the upgrade. What was really unfortunate, is that there was
> a kernel upgrade. And what was even more unfortunate is that the kernel
> version number was the same as the previous one. So it deleted the old
> one...

Can you explain the nature of the failure (what actually happened to your
computer as a result)?  It isn't obvious that a crash during a kernel
upgrade would cause a problem, and if it does, it can probably be fixed.

> As you can guess, the result was that the computer was unbootable (and
> still is ;-)). I know the upgrade contains only security fixes, but I
> believe the version number should have been incremented, if only to
> prevent problems like this one. Wouldn't it make sense to adopt this
> policy?

Installing every kernel in parallel isn't very workable; at over 50M per
kernel this would occupy a huge amount of space, and all third-party modules
added by the user/admin would need to be recompiled with every upgrade.

-- 
 - mdz