[Bug 1783044] Re: grub-efi-amd64 postinst fails to install GRUB if /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/ is not present

[Phillip Susi]

I would think that the postinst script should use a low priority debconf
question to ask if you want to create the directory and install or not,
and default to not if you aren't showing low priority questions.

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Title:
  grub-efi-amd64 postinst fails to install GRUB if /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/
  is not present

Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  This concerns grub-efi-amd64 2.02-2ubuntu8.1 in Ubuntu 18.04/bionic.

  When the grub-efi-amd64 package is initially installed on a system
  that has not previously booted via the Ubuntu EFI bootloader (so
  /boot/efi/ is either empty, or at least does not have a
  /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/ directory), the package postinst script fails to
  install anything into /boot/efi/.

  The postinst script, in fact, contains this conditional around the
  grub-install invocation:

      if [ "$bootloader_id" ] && [ -d "/boot/efi/EFI/$bootloader_id" ];
  then

  It's not clear why this is here. There might be a reason why you would
  not want to install/update the bootloader if the directory for it
  isn't already there. In my case, however, I am running the postinst
  script (via dpkg-reconfigure) precisely to populate an EFI partition
  from scratch.

  I can work around this issue with a simple

      # mkdir -p /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu

  before running dpkg-reconfigure, but this is far from obvious.

  An additional problem with the conditional is that if it fails, no
  message is given to the user that the postinst is omitting the GRUB
  install, let alone the reason why. If the user misses the absence of
  the grub-install message, they'll only find out something went wrong
  when they attempt to boot using the newly-installed bootloader and it
  doesn't work.

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