Comment 30 for bug 1443735

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 12:02:17PM -0000, Ewan wrote:
> Robie,
>
> > We deliberately didn't do this is as will cause a prompt
> I suppose another way would be to conditionally append the value via a
> postinst script, but I further suppose you declined to take this
> approach because it lacks elegance.

It would cause an unnecessary conffile prompt on the next conffile
update following that, since it would appear to be a user-made change.

That's why the best thing to do is to leave files in /etc/ for only
users to change directly, rather than have maintainer scripts change
them. We do use .d/ directories to try and help with this, but I don't
think it'd help in this case as it won't solve the user confusion issue
you're trying to solve.

> > As far as I understand, the recordfail path should only get followed after a boot failure.
> I opened https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1475620
> - I agree the issue should get corrected at source, if possible.

Thank you for filing this. I've moved it to grub2 as I'm pretty sure
it's the grub2 packaging that arranges the recordfail test (as opposed
to kernel code or packaging).