Comment 109 for bug 1357093

I tried the advice given on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RemoveOldKernels, but it mostly doesn't work. For example, "apt-get autoremove --purge" removed zero kernels. To install "purge-old-kernels" would require installing like 60 dependencies of "bikeshed", which seems unreasonable.

I think part of the problem is that the tools behave differently depending on who installed a kernel, but /boot gets full based on the number of kernels, not who installed them. My machine (a netbook) is basically never left on long enough to run an unattended upgrade, so I run upgrades manually. That means basically every kernel was manually installed, so something that removes only automatically installed kernels is 0% useful. In the real world the problem is disk space, not assigning blame for who installed a given kernel! Any process that installs new kernels without deleting old kernels will eventually fill up a finite-sized /boot. Any solution that doesn't address the sad fact of the finiteness of /boot will leave some people, probably the most inexpert, stuck. I personally can manually grub around and remove kernels, so this is only annoying, not show-stopping, but I think we have lots of evidence that it is show-stopping for some people, which suggests that there are many more people out there who don't know how to complain who are also injured.

Bottom line: /boot is finite, so anybody who installs a kernel without deleting a kernel is doing something that will sink somebody's ship. Given that lots of machines out there are clogged by the old maintenance processes, any solution that doesn't explicitly address how to un-clog a machine clogged by the previous solutions isn't really a solution.