[TriLUG] lesson learned: don't upgrade kernel with rpm -F (or -U)

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wednesday, March 13 2002, Chris Hedemark said:
> The lesson I learned the hard way about RPM and kernels was back with Red Hat 
> 6.x where you would upgrade the kernel but some kernel packages would not 
> update /etc/lilo.conf but then later ones would, though without running lilo 
> first to read the new configuration.  So you would basically end up with an 
> unbootable system.

The kernel packages still don't update LILO configs... LILO config
updaters that are simple and accurate would be accepted in bugzilla ;-)
up2date actually does this, but in python and we can't have the kernel
require python because that would be silly.

And newer kernel packages actually should do the right thing if you
upgrade them about loading the loop module before they get
uninstalled... I forget exactly when we added that, though.
 
> I did an RPM-based kernel upgrade with Red Hat 7.2 and didn't have any 
> problems.  I think grub certainly deserves some of the credit there.

Grub gets part of it for having a mostly sane config file and the rest
of the credit goes to Erik and /sbin/grubby which probably needs a man
page written now that I think about it.

Jeremy