Automatic Old Kernel Removal Spec Proposal

[Sivan Greenberg]

On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 06:50 -0400, Peter Whittaker wrote:
> Would it not be possible to have some sort of "sliding contents" list of
> meta-packages, along the lines of
> 
> 	kernel-latest
> 	kernel-latest-1
> 	kernel-latest-2
> ?
> 
> The contents of the meta-packages would change (kernel 2.x.y.z would
> move from kernel-latest to kernel-latest-1 when 2.x.y.z+1 was released).
> 
> grub, et al, would always use the real name, e.g., 2.x.y.z.
> 
> I would think the right thing to do would be to NOT remove latest-1,
> latest-2, etc., automagically, as that could bork the system.

Once you've booted the system with the new kernel, and already have one
kernel back tagged as 'last-known-good' what do you suspect could go bad
when removing the latest-2 one?

> 
> Some means of querying the user could be developed as part of the
> regular updates check, e.g., "Your kernel has been updated, you have
> rebooted successfully with the new version, and healthCheckOMatic has
> not found any problems: Would you like to remove the previous version?
> (Answer 'No' if you are unsure)?" A second message would also be useful
> ("You are short on disk space on /, removing previous kernels would
> help").

I would opt to ask the the user to run a very small checklist before he
answers this (does networking work?, can you access all of your
partitions ? Does X still work etc..), as booting the new kernel does
not necessarily means everything is okay and the old one can be purged.
The second message might be more appropriate for a
free-more-space-wizard spec, to cater for more ways to free up space in
general. (removing old log files, cleaning up out dated cache etc). 

> 
> Of course, some users might want a way of pinning their machine at a
> particular kernel version (e.g., a kernel-pinned meta-package - under
> user control?).

Maybe this could be something for the update-manager to take care of? 

-Sivan