Debian, wtf! @#**&#
We all woke up with a broken debian testing this morning.
You fix it by removing /boot from the Grub entries. You type ‘e’ and then you go to the vmlinuz line, and you remove “/boot” from that line.
Thanks Debian guys! Remember that normal people would have reformatted their computer and called debian “junk”. You’re even making the software developers nervous. We install debian testing because we don’t like Ubuntu’s broken upgrades. You don’t have to copy this.
Cheers.
ps. I of course understand that testing != stable. But still, Grub? That’s a drastic way to make your point about Debian testing being unstable :-)
Edit: Apparently I was on unstable for the system where this failed. That might explain it.
November 27th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Ha Ha!
November 27th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
do you know what TESTING mean?
November 27th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
@rita: yes, read the ps.
November 27th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
@rita, I think phillip is quite well versed in what testing means… The fact that testing breaks boot, well obviously the packager didn’t even test before he widened that to the testing audience… So the question is… Does the packager know how to TEST a package before he releases it to a community of people for TESTING in a wider scale?
Effectively I’d say erm… No…
November 27th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
The bug report you cite is about the unstable version (1.97+20091125-1), not the version in testing (1.97~beta3-1). There have been no upgrades of Grub2 in testing since the middle of September.
November 27th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
@Michael: hmm, interesting. I wonder why I got the upgrade then? Perhaps I’m on unstable without knowing it? Hehe.
Thanks for the heads up!
November 27th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Karl, no “TESTER” can possibly test for every corner case, at least not in a voluntary organisation like Debian. Instead of Philip and you ranting, maybe you could donate some of your time to the Grub team to help prevent such cases in the future?
Grub is a special package in that most of us probably don’t use it every day, since we leave computers running or use software suspend. If you wanted to help, then doing regular “bootability” tests would probably be a far better use of everyone’s time than to slay Debian or the Grub maintainers.
If you (both) would like to maintain your position, however, then maybe you ought to seriously consider one of the commercially-backed distros with resources for more rigorous QA.
November 27th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
@pvanhoof: A retraction would be in order before Slashdot has it on its frontpage.
November 27th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
@Michael Banck: Oh don’t worry so much about it. Who cares about the religiously fanatic nutcases who are the slashdot users nowadays anyway? No serious software developer in the communities does anymore. I already added the ps. half an hour ago, and that’s sufficient.
November 27th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
@pvanhoof: You are slandering Debian testing by blaming it for a bug in unstable you managed to get caught up in due to user error, the ps changes nothing about this.
You are of course entitled to keep up your post as is, it is your blog.
November 27th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
@Michael Banck: your suggestion that I should remove or edit a blog article is indeed nonsense. I’m indeed entitled to keep my post as is. It’s indeed my blog. That you think it’s slandering is your problem. I don’t think it’s user error, it’s error by the packager that is affecting a lot of people (a lot of my friends are telling me in private chats they had the same problem this week).
Bye Michael.
November 27th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
@pvanhoof: I was not talking about removing your blog post, more like an “Update: oops, seems the bug is not in testing after all but in unstable, sorry about that” type of thing some people do when they realize they were mistaken.
If you think you use testing and manage to upgrade grub2 from unstable without noticing, that would be user error. We are of course sorry for the grub2 bug in unstable and realize it hit a lot of users.
However, we give no guarantees about unstable (hence the name), but we try to make testing usable to most users.
November 27th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
“maybe you could donate some of your time to the Grub team to help prevent such cases in the future?”
LOL I’m far too busy with real life stuff…
November 27th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
@Michael Banck: sure, I can do that. I added another ps.
November 27th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
These things happend. We learn from the mistakes and continue using and developing the best universal os around. Happy hacking :)
November 27th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
@pvanhoof: Thanks a lot, much appreciated.
November 27th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
On some distros, there is a “ln -s . boot” in the boot partition allowing to use the same path from bot the root partition and the boot partition.
November 27th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
@tuXXX: yes, that’s how I fixed it once I succeeded in figuring out the problem. I didn’t want to alter the menu.lst file myself, and figured that this is a package-neutral way to solve it :-)
November 27th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Unstable is not for dumb people. News at 11.
November 27th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Glad that we have Tom around to point out for who unstable is. The world would be a much worse place without you, Tom. THANKS
November 27th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
I agree that Debian developer(s) in question did something stupid and I support your rant. :) Having said that, I think you should also take it positively when others whine about your mistakes. One learns from his/her mistake and if you are unable to accept your mistakes, you can’t ever learn.
I am saying this cause whenever I have told that Tracker is doing something stupid (e.g not supporting –version option), you get totally defensive and tell me to fix it for you. :)
November 27th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
@Zeeshan: Well you needed the feature! :) (ps. I was not defensive, at least not in intention. Argh online communication! I’m in Helsinki next week so that’s going to be a better chat with you). In any case: when online and I come over in a defensive way: assume I mean well and that I’m not actually being defensive at all.
November 27th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Er, alternately, try to come across as less defensive?
November 28th, 2009 at 1:55 am
Why do people run testing? There’s no manual assurance of quality, it’s just stuff from unstable that hasn’t had a bug filed for a couple of weeks.
If a bug like this did manage to fall into testing it could be weeks before it was fixed simply by virtue of bugs being filed against unstable, even though a fix would be in unstable within hours.
November 28th, 2009 at 7:37 am
been bitten by that one too.
it appears the function make_system_path_relative_to_its_root used in /etc/grub.d/10_linux is broken
November 28th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Of course, this only affects people who use separate /boot partitions anyway, not normal users…
November 29th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
One could say now that normal people DO use a seperate /boot partition :)
November 30th, 2009 at 2:14 am
@Florian - Surely fewer people use a separate /boot partition, as there is no widespread BIOS limitation these days?
@pvanhoof: I think that what people are trying to say, is that if you said “Debian Testing” broke when you should have said “Debian Unstable - which gives the guarantee that if it breaks, you get to keep both parts, broke”, then you owe a retraction (and IMNSVHO an apology) to Debian Testing, which you were not using.
Use unstable -> expect unstable. What more can be said? If you are using Debian Unstable for production systems, you deserve to be held responsible for any failures. Do not try to pass this responsibility off to others. You could have chosen Stable, you could even have chosen to pay RedHat or SuSE for support, and you can be sure that they - just like Debian Stable - would not change Grub behind your back