apt-get autoremove should leave (n-1)th kernel

[Peter Lemieux]

Running autoremove tonight on a 13.10 machine being upgraded to 14.04, I was informed by apt-get that I could delete no longer needed kernel packages with autoremove. When I did so I was left with just the current kernel. I suggest that autoremove should always leave the (n-1)th kernel behind. Otherwise users cannot revert to the previous kernel if something goes wrong. I believe this has been the default behavior for "apt-get autoremove" for some time now.

You could argue that if a user is able to run autoremove, then there is no point to keeping the previous kernel image. I disagree. Users may not test out all their connected devices before running autoremove and then discover they cannot use a camera or audio device.

Release: 14.04 (Trusty)
Package: apt, Version: 0.9.14.1ubuntu2 (and earlier)
Expected: "apt-get autoremove" would leave current and prior kernel images installed
Actual: only current kernel image remains

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

The code here is configured to always leave exactly two kernels installed, with the running kernel as one of them. What were the kernel packages that you had installed before and after this autoremoval?

[Peter Lemieux (seijisensei)]

It seemed that autoremove ignored a stale kernel on my machine. Once I manually removed older kernels, recent kernel updates now work correctly. I currently have just 3.13.0-13 and 3.13.0-12 installed by using autoremove after the most recent round of updates.

This report should probably be closed.