Bug#919029: grub-pc: meaningless message "RUB boot loader was previously installed..."

[Colin Watson]

Control: found grub-pc/2.02+dfsg1-9

On Sat, Jan 12, 2019 at 02:06:47AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> Control: severity -1 grave
> 
> Raising to grave since:

I'm marking this as present in the version in testing (even though I'm
not entirely convinced it's a bug in the GRUB packaging at all), because
none of this has changed at all since the version in testing and so it
doesn't need to block migration of an upload that fixes two other RC
bugs while we investigate this one.

>   * grub-pc doesn't let me install GRUB (I assume the new version)
>     while this was normally needed.
>   * The change in config.dat seems to imply that GRUB changed the
>     configuration in my back.

grub-pc.postinst detected that the disk's ID changed, and offered you a
choice of devices to install to instead since when the ID changes it has
no safe way to proceed automatically.  You didn't select any of those
devices, perhaps because most of the checkbox was cut off, and so there
was nothing further that grub-pc.postinst could do except warn you about
the situation.

The ID changing is presumably the systemd bug you mentioned, and that
seems to be the grave part of this.  The rest of the bug is figuring out
why the dialog box was malformed.  Perhaps it's because the long ID of
/dev/dm-0 caused it to overflow, and debconf somehow decided to display
an oversized dialog rather than truncating or wrapping or whatever?
That seems to me to be a debconf bug rather than something that should
be worked around in grub-pc, though.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]