2013-12-20
Tools which change the system state shou ... 5 years ago
Tools which change the system state should work on the principle of least surprise: don't change defaults from one version to the next and whenever something goes wrong revert to a safe state. Today I found out grub 0.97 can get in a confused state about menu.lst and it will do the sane thing when running update-grub: not update menu.lst. Good. It also did not warn about this state, so no new kernels were added to the list, leading to confusion. As a workaround I renamed menu.lst, ran update-grub again which gave me a warning the file was missing and it would be recreated. I looked at the differences in default options afterward and applied them. All the installed kernels were back in the list and things were back to normal so I could fix the next problem.