Re: failure to remove+purge debian package generated by make deb-pkg

[Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>]

Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
> I created and successfully installed a custom kernel package using
> $(make deb-pkg).
> 
> Then after a failed boot test I removed it and then thought that I
> actually want to purge it.
> 
> Cannot delete /boot/initrd.img-2.6.33-rc8-rt, doesn't exist.
> run-parts: /etc/kernel/postrm.d/initramfs-tools exited with return code 1

It has nothing to do with the kernel package itself. The problem is in the 
maintainer scripts that are run as hooks from /etc/kernel/*.d.

The kernel package built by deb-pkg does not have any maintainer scripts of 
itself. All it does is run whatever is in the hooks. As custom kernels may 
have other requirements than distro ones it's not surprising that the 
distro hooks can throw errors [1].

Personally I use a set of custom hook scripts with my deb-pkg kernels. 
Simply because I don't want to have to fix issues that are the result of 
the distro hook scripts in /etc/kernel.

You can simply use custom hook scripts by doing e.g:
    export KDEB_HOOKDIR=/etc/kernel.custom
before calling 'make deb-pkg'. You can then create your own hook scripts 
in /etc/kernel.custom/{pre,post}{inst,rm}.d/.

Cheers,
FJP

[1] Although in this case I would say that the initrd could also simply be 
removed using 'rm -f' so it does not fail if it does not exist.
You could file a BR against the package that installed that particular hook 
script, probably initramfs-tools.