[Bug 1314350] Re: do-release-upgrade --sandbox will always fail at installing grub

[Colin Watson]

This seems an awfully fragile approach.  For instance, the upgrader
might reasonably change to using overlayfs in the future.

Could we not have an environment variable that tells us whether we're
being run in a sandbox, or something?

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Title:
  do-release-upgrade --sandbox will always fail at installing grub

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in “ubuntu-release-upgrader” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  The whole point of --sandbox is that permanent "system level" changes
  cannot be made. For most packages the aufs overlay provides the
  allusion of a writable system without actually writing any changes.
  Grub, by its nature, needs to be able to see the world as it actually
  is, and so the aufs overlay is not transparent and grub thankfully
  fails rather than writing to /dev/sda (which is not part of the
  overlay) and making the system unbootable when asked to by the grub-pc
  package which runs "grub-install /dev/sda".

  When running in sandbox mode, somehow any attempts to run grub-
  mkconfig or grub-install (or direct use of efibootmgr when dealing
  with shim on UEFI systems) should be prevented, and their inability to
  run should not be considered an error.

  Alternatively, it should be at least documented that do-release-
  upgrade --sandbox will *always* lead to a failed upgrade (with the
  possible exception of some paravirt / container installations where
  the bootloader is not upgraded in the guest).

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
  Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:0.220.2
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-61.92-generic 3.2.55
  Uname: Linux 3.2.0-61-generic i686
  ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3
  Architecture: i386
  CrashDB: ubuntu
  CurrentDesktop: LXDE
  Date: Tue Apr 29 11:11:35 2014
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-06-29 (669 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" - Release i386 (20120423)
  PackageArchitecture: all
  ProcEnviron:
   TERM=xterm
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2014-04-29 (0 days ago)

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