Bug#1030846: Bug#1030939: e2fsprogs: generates filesystems that grub-install doesn't recognize

[Daniel Leidert]

Am Dienstag, dem 14.02.2023 um 14:58 +0000 schrieb Steve McIntyre:
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 12:50:18PM +0100, Daniel Leidert wrote:
> 
> 
[..]
> Breakages happen like this,

This breakage is *unnecessary* and it breaks at the momnent *all*
debootstrap installations except for doing a bookworm/sid installation
themselves. That is just stupid.

Get down from your high horse and ackknowledge the problems your
behavior causes.

> and this has happened before in similar
> circumstances.

No it has not. You are doing a breakage on purpose during a freeze
period while the transition period is over. Do it with a proper
transition during the next release cycle.


> > 
[..]
> > Whe whole handling is completely wrong here. First, grub should have
> > been fixed upstream. And the change in e2fsprogs should have been done
> > only after "fixed" grub versions had settled. If we do it the other way
> > around, we have to patch grub in affected distributions as well. And
> > for Debian that means at least to patch Bullseye and any other release
> > we want to be able to install from Bookworm. I even a lot of companies
> > using Buster still.
> 
> And I know of folks still working on Stretch and Jessie. How far back
> do you want to tie things??

How about staying on topic and explaining, why this transition is
necessary and has to be done the wrong way around, instead of picking
the fact that older systems still exist? You break almost *all*
installation right now. You also broke an Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04 LTS
installation. Are they new enough?

[..]
> > 
> > I'm critizicing the way of handling that breaking change and the
> > ignorance shown reagarding the impact, not that fact that there is a
> > breaking change. And it breaks a lot! This doesn't affect just a few
> > minor use cases. It affects the basic way of installing a clean Ubuntu
> > or Debian (or derivative) on a remote server using the debootstrap
> > method.
> 
> People using these tools need to be aware of the potential issue. What
> would happen if you ran debootstrap with a filesystem that the target
> distro doesn't know how to mount at all, for example?

That is different from introducing a breaking change for which no grub
upstream release has a fix yet. So basically the only system able to
handle a filesystem created with e2fsprogs 1.47.0 is Sid right now. Can
you please ignore your ego and see the problems you are causing?

You push a breaking change for no reason at all. What is the gain here
compared to the issues you are causing?

> > And again: We are in the middle of a freeze here. And e2fsprogs
> > pushes
> > a breaking change that is not even handled by any existing grub
> > upstream release, and is also not properly handled within Debian?!
> 
> Grub upstream is already known to be problematic in terms of release
> cycles.

That is not enough and it is not a solution for the problem. There is
*no* grub version out there supporting this, except for the patched
version is Sid. Is this the sign for a working transition?

> We now know about this particular issue (thanks Ted!) and
> we've fixed it in unstable (and soon testing).

Which helps exactly nobody, as it still breaks all other Debian or
Ubuntu installation.

I cannot belive that you intentionally break one of the standard
methods to install Debian or Ubuntu for no reason at all and without a
proper transition. Version 1.47.0 of e2fsprogs contains nothing
necessary for Bookworm. I'll bring this to the attention of the release
team. I'm sick of your ignorance. Do a proper transition and don't
start it during a freeze.


Daniel