Agreed! I've checked out the scripts and they look fine to me. All I know is I was messing around with building, installing, uninstalling various versions of columbus. At some point modest started returning an error. Naively I thought that rebooting would help - in fact it did the opposite and I had to learn a bit more about bootloader options before I could get it back on track.

My best explanation at this point is that I may have interrupted an install or uninstall process at an inopportune moment. In any case I'm still messing about with columbus so I'll be extra careful to check if it happens again.

Jonathan