On 26-12-2016 02:54, Eli Schwartz via arch-general wrote:
On 12/24/2016 10:33 AM, Mauro Santos via arch-general wrote:
What other distros do is recommend a 1GB /boot or changing the configuration to reduce the number of older kernels installed[1]. People have complained about small libraries needing to be installed as being wasteful, at a grand total 100MiB+ for each kernel that would start a nice flamewar.
Well, we already expect people to take care of orphans themselves, and nobody is suggesting old kernels *must* be kept around forever.
There is also the matter of automagic bootloader configuration change to support that, not to mention people that use efistub to boot their system, how do you propose to handle that?
The blatantly obvious way would be with a dummy kernel package containing a symlink to the vmlinuz/initramfs of the latest versioned package. Old bootloader configurations don't care about how many new and irrelevant files aren't being looked at.
If you want new bootloader entries to be automatically added in grub.cfg then simply use a pacman hook to re-run grub-mkconfig -- I am sure something similar can be easily done for syslinux/EFI. You can also edit the boot cmdline from grub itself...
Automagic updates? No thank you. Stay away from my configuration files and efi variables.
If you have installed archlinux, it's reasonable to expect that one knows how to configure this.
It is you who said "I wish arch would (like other distros) keep 2 or three old kernel versions around" not me. Other distributions automagically take care of updating the bootloader configuration, as much would be expected of arch. Some people already have trouble managing to update one kernel properly, imagine the chaos it would be with more than one if manual steps were involved, not to mention old kernels have _known_ security issues and having old stuff around is not the Arch way.
What problems are people having with updating one kernel? Please elaborate on your vagueness.
Forgetting to reboot, which you address below and I have to agree that as things are now they are not optimal. Forgetting to mount /boot and all the "fun" stuff that every once in a while pops up in the forum.
As for known security issues and keeping old stuff around, I could care less about offering all kernels in the repos -- I just don't want my old kernel to be uninstalled until I say so.
See http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16702 for more details, but the basic gist is that versioned kernel installs are a *good* thing, as opposed to being forced to reboot every time your --sysupgrade includes the kernel (which is what *I* would call not-very-Arch-way), and it is intended that we will eventually get versioned kernels, and the fact that we don't have that today is simply because it is low-priority and tpowa hasn't gotten around to it yet.
(I am not entirely sure what the holdup is, though.)
-- Mauro Santos