default timeout is too low, impossible to escape in a VM

Thierry, can I get your opinion on this one? Perhaps a papercut?

For the moment, this is set as sabdfl instructed me to set it. I argued against it at the time.

Maybe we can act differently on server vs. desktop or something.

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 6:16 PM, Colin Watson <email address hidden> wrote:
> Maybe we can act differently on server vs. desktop or something.

Yeah, this is all I'm asking for. A non-zero default for servers
and/or virtual machine installations.

Note that as a truly nasty work around, if I run kvm with the -no-kvm
option, it slows things down enough that *sometimes* I can actually
get to the boot menu. Obviously, this is no fix...

Right, it's set the way it is to avoid losing one precious second in the desktop boot. I'm all for changing it for "servers".

However, as evidenced by a heated discussion at UDS-M, there is no clear definition of a "server" that would magically allow us to switch between the two settings. Did you have anything in mind, Colin ?

I think for the boot loader, this is pretty simple as it's almost invariably installed by the installer, so we can act differently depending on the install media.

Differentiate using the installer being used. Makes sense, for that package :)

I have a couple of patches (for debian-cd and grub-installer) that should get this done. The grub-installer one lets us set the delay, the debian-cd one does it by default for installs done from the server CD. They're completely untested (I've never worked out how to quickly and easily test anything that involves the installer, and I can't devote much time to this), but I hope they can at least serve as a starting point.

I'll push them both in a minute.

Marking Triaged (since Soren has attached proposed fixes), High (since this is confirmed serious by multiple Server Core Developers), and proposing for Maverick, and milestoning it against GA (hoping that this gets fixed by then). The latter milestone might be removed by a member of the release team upon consideration.

Soren,

As for testing in the installer, here's what I usually do...

 * Build the binary udeb locally
 * Boot a daily ISO in a VM
 * As soon as the Networking is configured, drop to a shell (Alt-F2)
 * anna-install openssh-client
 * Now you should have scp
 * scp <user>@10.0.2.2:/path/to/your/udeb
 * udpkg -i <your udeb>

I think this should work for the grub-installer package.

Milestoned bugs must be assigned. tentatively assigning to Colin so that he reviews the proposed patches.

Soren, this generally looks fine (and was roughly the approach I was going to take before noticing your patches), but could you call the debconf template grub-installer/timeout instead of grub-installer/boot_delay, for consistency with the /etc/default/grub variable name?

In your debian-cd patch, you're missing "string " before "2".

Beware that Dustin's testing approach will not work in this case, because the grub-installer patch adds a new template and udpkg -i needs to be in the right context to talk to the running debconf frontend. Furthermore, it's very important to use udpkg --unpack here since otherwise udpkg will run the new postinst on the spot.

This is awkward - you need to insert the udpkg --unpack call into some carefully chosen postinst that's already sourced the debconf confmodule. Don't worry about it in this case, as I'll sort it out.

I'll make the necessary adjustments to Soren's branches.

This bug was fixed in the package grub-installer - 1.55ubuntu2

---------------
grub-installer (1.55ubuntu2) maverick; urgency=low

  [ Soren Hansen ]
  * Add a preseedable grub-installer/timeout template to adjust the initial
    GRUB timeout (LP: #628418).
 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:07:05 +0100

revno: 1600 [merge]
author: Soren Hansen <email address hidden>, Colin Watson <email address hidden>
committer: Colin Watson <email address hidden>
branch nick: debian-cd
timestamp: Mon 2010-09-06 12:47:14 +0100
message:
  Add a two-second GRUB delay for servers.
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    revno: 1599.1.4
    committer: Colin Watson <email address hidden>
    branch nick: server-timeout
    timestamp: Mon 2010-09-06 12:46:28 +0100
    message:
      same changes to amd64/i386-specific server seed variants
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    revno: 1599.1.3
    committer: Colin Watson <email address hidden>
    branch nick: server-timeout
    timestamp: Mon 2010-09-06 12:44:48 +0100
    message:
      grub-installer/boot_delay -> grub-installer/timeout
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    revno: 1599.1.2
    committer: Colin Watson <email address hidden>
    branch nick: server-timeout
    timestamp: Mon 2010-09-06 12:44:22 +0100
    message:
      formatting, and insert missing "string "
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    revno: 1599.1.1 [merge]
    committer: Colin Watson <email address hidden>
    branch nick: server-timeout
    timestamp: Mon 2010-09-06 12:43:41 +0100
    message:
      merge lp:~soren/debian-cd/ubuntu-server-grub-wait
        ------------------------------------------------------------
        revno: 1594.1.1
        fixes bug(s): https://launchpad.net/bugs/628418
        committer: Soren Hansen <email address hidden>
        branch nick: ubuntu
        timestamp: Thu 2010-09-02 10:24:09 +0200
        message:
          Add a two second GRUB delay for servers.