Gripes with update-grub and general package quality

About a year ago I installed ubuntu dapper on two of our servers. Being oldskool I wanted to use trusted old lilo but I was asked by the powers that be to use grub as the other techs knows it better. I very quickly got irritated because of the default options: quiet and splash. I want my servers to run in text mode and be noisy when they boot. Opened up /boot/grub/menu.lst and modified defoptions like a good boy, but unfortunately you cannot have an empty defoptions. update-grub cannot distinguish between an empty and a non-existant setting, so it very helpfully sets it back to the default. Putting a single space in there works exactly once: it removes the space next time you run update-grub and the next time it goes back to the default. So I hacked it:

# defoptions=iwantthisempty

This morning I had an issue with a kernel that does not understand root=UUID=blahblah syntax. Don't ask, bleeding edge hardware and that sort of thing. So once again I modified the kopt setting and it kept ignoring me. At least you can override it by using a version specific setting:

# kopt_2_6_18=root=/dev/sda1 ro

It turns out that update-grub always converts old style syntax to the new UUID syntax, so kopt is pretty much useless if you need to set a legacy root setting.

Then there is the fglrx-kernel-source package. It was broken in dapper. It is STILL broken in edgy. Others have reported similar problems with this package. I contributed a patch that solves most of the problems a while ago,
but nevertheless the broken package shipped with edgy.