Re: For the grub maintainers II
On Sat, Sep 05, 2009 at 10:55:42PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> Philipp Kern wrote:
> > Do you have os-prober installed?
>
> I would not recommend having os-prober installed for this. os-prober has
> always been intended to be run only _once_, mostly when a new system is
> installed. It exists as a .deb to be used for example after a debootstrap
> installation of a system (i.e. an install that did not use D-I).
Of course, os-prober is collaboratively maintained by the d-i team
rather than by a single person. Personally, I have no problem with grub2
using it. Right now, given that grub2's configuration file format is
still changing in small ways from time to time, it's a lot more
straightforward to probe this on each update-grub run than it is to
probe it statically - in other words I think the latter would cause
*more* problems, not fewer.
We should make it more efficient and less intrusive, but that's
perfectly feasible in os-prober itself and would be a good idea anyway.
> Relying on os-prober to migrate from grub1 to grub2 is bad anyway as it
> will in no way preserve any existing manually added/changed boot menu
> entries. Migrating existing "other os" entries really needs to be solved
> in a different way.
I don't see this as solving the migration issue, but as a perfectly good
configuration mechanism in its own right.
Migration is a separate and harder problem; it's really a language
translation problem in some ways, with the added wrinkle that really, we
only want to migrate custom entries. Anything that's basically a
modified version of one of the system-provided entries would be *much*
better catered for by making the appropriate adjustments to
/etc/default/grub and letting the new grub-mkconfig configuration system
take care of it.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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