Re: Latest kernel shown at last

[Pavel Roskin]

Quoting shirish <address@hidden>:

> Hi all,
>  Please look at the following :-
>
> address@hidden:~$ sudo update-grub
> [sudo] password for shirish:
> Updating /boot/grub/grub.cfg ...
> Found Debian background: debian-blueish-wallpaper-640x480.png
> Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-8-generic
> Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-8-generic
> Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-7-generic
> Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-7-generic
> Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-5-generic
> Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-5-generic
> Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-10-generic
> Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-10-generic
> Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
> done
[skip]
> AFAIK the convention has been always that the latest kernel shows at the top.

Yes.  At least that's the idea.

> This is on grub2 (1.96+20080203-1ubuntu1) dunno whether its a bug
> which should be filed in grub2 here or something which got messed up
> while packaging it for ubuntu. Any help/guidance would be nice.

Please note that 1 is less than 5.  The Debian revision is compared as  
string, not as number.

Correct comparing of Linux versions is very hard.  At very least, all  
sequences of digits should be compared numerically.  I don't think GNU  
sort can do that.  And then there is an issue with comparing "-pre",  
"-rc", "-test", "-mm" and other suffixes.  And the separators have  
different meanings - think of comparing 2.6.24-10 and 2.6.24.2-1.

I was thinking of fixing it, but I'm not sure it can even be done in  
shell script.  We may need to write a helper in C just for that, or  
resort to bashisms.

--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin