Comment 23 for bug 1829805

There was some discussion regarding this particular bug in #ubuntu-release on 20190620 - https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2019/06/20/%23ubuntu-release.html. I will not summarize the conversation here but only capture what I understand the bug in initramfs-tools to be.

update-initramfs no longer uses what is in /var/lib/initramfs-tools as a source of knowledge about kernel versions so using "-k all" will not bring a deleted initrd. This behavior does not match the documentation and is a regression. Some choice quotes follow:

"[20:52] <infinity> That appears to completely ignore STATEDIR now.
[20:59] <infinity> Anyhow, the behaviour change above is that it switched from checking STATEDIR to stating the initrd.
[20:59] <infinity> So, instead of "statedir knows what we've done in the past", we have "in you have no initrd, you can't have a new one either".
[20:59] <infinity> s/in you/if you/
[21:02] <infinity> https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/initramfs-tools/commit/f39625afd6ba6c1aa2027286dc3ef1c933da14e0
[21:03] <infinity> vorlon: That would be the offending commit. I think the obvious way to get both old and new behaviour combined would just be to add the statedir bit to the list (and sort -u the mess)."