Comment 26 for bug 132311

I personally do not think that all the bugs marked as duplicates are actually duplicates of this bug. I do not think that boot menu clutter is the same problem as upgrades failing because /boot is full, which the OP and many of the (IMHO legitimate) duplicates are complaining about. I personally do not think it's a good idea to mark as duplicate bugs which describe different problems but which might (but only might) be fixed by the same change. I hear what you're saying and respect your opinion, but I just happen to disagree.

I'm tempted to de-dup the bugs that are about clutter and just concentrate on solving the problem of upgrades failing because /boot is full. That to me is a more serious problem, but also probably a more solvable problem. I've spoken to a few people and many of us are more conservative about removing old kernels because it's actually fairly difficult to know which should be safe to remove. The proposal to address this is https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/removing-old-kernels but that seems not to have gone anywhere since 2008. The problem of course is that if you get this wrong, you will break the user's system in ways that most will almost certainly be unable to fix, which seems like a bad idea <wink>.

I still think the best way to handle failing upgrades due to /boot space exhaustion is to be explicit and let the user decide to remove unused packages, including old kernels. So I still think the safest solution is to 1) make sure update-manager has a foolproof way of determining whether there is enough disk space before it proceeds; 2) providing information about "unused software" and how much space it takes up; 3) providing a button to fire off computer-janitor which will allow the user to select what they want to remove.