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

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2019-01-12 10:36:02 +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> >   * 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.

Indeed, since the checkbox was cut off and the corresponding
information wasn't in the message text either, I did not know
that there was something to select.

> The ID changing is presumably the systemd bug you mentioned, and that
> seems to be the grave part of this.

I suppose that this part has now been fixed:

systemd (240-3) unstable; urgency=medium
[...]
  * libudev-util: Make util_replace_whitespace() read only len characters.
    Fixes a regression where /dev/disk/by-id/ names had additional
    underscores.
[...]
 -- Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org>  Wed, 09 Jan 2019 18:40:57 +0100

> 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.

I'm wondering. The paragraphs that came before the text with the
long ID were wrapped. Was this wrapping done by grub-pc or debconf?
If the former, I assume that it is grub-pc's responsibility to do
the wrapping.

Also note that enlarging the terminal window and having the dialog
redisplayed (by going to the next message and back) did not solve
the issue.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)