Users only know about the problems, they haven’t a vast experience with support requests besides the ones they made.
I noticed an huge decrease in support requests for install of Whonix, although the problem has shifted to installer bugs, which have also decreased over time.
Just now bumped into a corner case on the derivative-maker CI, which however also could happen to users.
Situation: An older kernel 6.1.0-9-amd64 was installed but a newer kernel 6.1.0-13-amd64 was already available in the repository.
Symptom:
Loading new virtualbox-7.0.12 DKMS files...
Building for 6.1.0-9-amd64 6.1.0-13-amd64
Module build for kernel 6.1.0-9-amd64 was skipped since the
kernel headers for this kernel do not seem to be installed.
Building initial module for 6.1.0-13-amd64
This means no kernel modules will be built for the older kernel. This will result in VirtualBox not being startable before reboot. The installer will notice at the end that the module could not be load. (But it doesn’t know yet it was never been built.) VirtualBox will work after reboot because then the newer kernel will run and modules for these could be build.
Potential solutions:
A) Attempt to install the kernel headers for the older kernel. Probably not worth it. Might be no longer available in the repository. Potentially insecure. Only “needed” until reboot. (And let’s not bother with snapshot.debian.org.)
B) Detect this situation beforehand.
Should we automatically upgrade the kernel? Should we run sudo apt dist-upgrade? This might make more changes than a few users are ready to take.
I think it’s best to just detect it and point that out. The code for that can be quite complex. Maybe can be simplified. See also:
CI is broken for Fedora builds with --onion. That is because Tor isn’t running inside the CI because Fedora docker image comes without systemd by default.
I downloaded the dist-installer-cli. I found that on line 831 the switch case conditional statement executes on the keyword “buntu” instead of “Ubuntu”. Is this on purpose? If it is please put a comment in the code explaining why. Is it because there are distros names “Edubuntu”, “Kubuntu”, “Lubuntu” and “Ubuntu”?