I recently suffered 2 weeks of downtime of a machine in a location that
made fixing it hard, caused by a broken initramfs due to bug #621137.
This highlighted to me that there are many things that can go wrong and
break an initramfs when it is refreshed, not just when upgrading to a
new kernel. And yet backup initramfses are not kept by default, except
for ones that accompany old kernel versions.

Space should not be a concern, since /boot is always provisioned with
space for multiple kernel and initramfs pairs. So I feel that setting
backup_initramfs=yes would be better than the current default,
leading to more robust and recoverable systems. Thank you.

it was an Ubuntu merge, as initramfs-tools initramfs were considered
stable, one could think to have this set for sid/testing until freeze.

the -ENOSPC error accounts for 50% of the Ubuntu bugs.
I do agree that it is not an initramfs-tools bug per se,
but of the invovled apt that do not cleanup a huge number
of linux-images that heppen due to their easy ABI bump.
Nevertheless due to the triggering the error happens very
late and kills the box.
(Not even starting to account for seperate /boot partitions)

* maximilian attems [Sam Apr 09, 2011 at 09:55:57 +0200]:

maximilian, how do we proceed with this issue?

regards,
-mika-