Comment 3 for bug 455619

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 09:35:38PM -0000, Steve Langasek wrote:
> grub-pc and grub are supposed to conflict; there was a window during
> which they didn't, at which point grub seems to have gotten installed on
> your system, and now apt is removing the wrong one on upgrade. Can we
> see the older apt logs, to see why grub got pulled in to begin with?
> (You don't have startupmanager installed, do you?)

Thinking about it further, I don't think I ever transitioned this system to
grub2, and it had been happily using grub.

The setup I ended up with after the upgrade was this:

ii grub 0.97-29ubuntu5 GRand Unified Bootloader
ii grub-common 1.97~beta4-1ub GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (common

with /usr/sbin/update-grub missing. Here's my best guess at what happened:

1. grub/grub-common were installed, with /usr/sbin/update-grub present

2. Something caused grub-pc to be installed while it did not conflict with
   grub, and grub-pc replaced /usr/sbin/update-grub (grub-pc Replaces: grub)

3. /usr/sbin/update-grub from grub-pc was being used for a while, updating
   grub.cfg and not menu.lst (but I didn't notice because I didn't reboot
   for a while)

4. The most recent upgrade opted to remove grub-pc in favour of keeping grub

5. /usr/sbin/update-grub was removed along with grub-pc, leaving nothing in
   its place

--
 - mdz