Comment 10 for bug 31126

>"and one I refuse to let myself forget to fix before dapper"

Someone fell asleep at the wheeeeel :-)

I've been hit by this several times, due to having at one time created a too small boot partition. Just now, it happened again. The only reason I noticed is because the rattling of the disk suddenly stopped and CPU usage went up at a time that was unexpected.

Here's an excerpt from my /boot after the failed upgrade:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6962511 2006-06-01 14:39 initrd.img-2.6.15-23-686
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6967716 2006-06-28 03:59 initrd.img-2.6.15-25-686
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1019904 2006-07-12 00:27 initrd.img-2.6.15-26-686

Notice the b0rken initrd-26 (file size)

What's so sinister about this is that the Update Manager will conclude with a "Upgrade Completed!" and a helpful hint that maybe rebooting would be a good idea :-\

While I believe the bug really covers a wider range of packets (the Upgrade Manager for sure!), here are some feature suggestions:

1. Have the Ubuntu Installer warn about creating too small /boot partitions. Currently, about 10MiB (9.2MiB for me) is needed _per kernel_. A message box should inform any user creating a /boot smaller than say 50MiB about how the system can keep kernels around and how this might become an issue.

2. The default grub configuration seems to be "keep all kernels"? I don't know what the actual limit if any is, but the "howmany" entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst ought to be set to something sane instead of "all", or whatever the default is. Personally I think '4' would be more than enough, in which case /boot would have to be at least 50MiB.

3. At no time can the Upgrade Manager be allowed to report success, if a kernel package fails. Never. Don't know whose fault this is (initrd, apt/dpkg, upgrade manager, whatever), but it's Got. To. Be. Fixed.