Comment 52 for bug 1789650

Rod,

Thanks for testing.

Looking at your results (I'll label the in-order 1 through 4). It appears to me that
1, 3, 4 were successful in that installed entry was not placed at the front of the list.

Is that correct?

For (2) where Ubuntu is already first in the list and then the install just updates this entry (not creating or removing) then curtin doesn't appear to reorder things in a way that keeps the system booting from PXE

Is that correct?

For (2), If we're in fallback mode and we don't detect a new entry (an existing Ubuntu (or Centos)) is already present; instead of using the previous order here, we could do any number of things: swap first and second options, push first to tend of the list. Looking at your system in scenario (2), just moving the Ubuntu entry somewhere other than the first entry would work. In general, I'm not sure this will always be correct; that is the next item in the boot order may not be PXE.

It's still better than nothing in the fallback scenario; I'll update the branch to detect this scenario and swap the installed slot back one entry.

> I saw no effect from this practice, except that installing with the ubuntu entry first without wiping the partition table is impossible -- or it would require some other workaround, like doing a one-time manual PXE boot, which I did not test.)

I don't quite follow the "installing with the ubunt entry first without wiping the partition table is impossible"; It sounds like you wanted to preserve the existing partition structure and just unpack the target OS on top of the disk? Curtin *can* support that but MAAS does not enable this functionality; It seems unrelated to the fix. Please let me know if you think something isn't working as expected.