ITP: pv-grub-menu.lst

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

reassign 672104 wnpp
retitle 672104 ITP: pv-grub-menu.lst

Dear all,

Some systems booted by PV-Grub need a menu.lst file like the one created by
grub1, but without GRUB itself on the MBR.  Such systems include computer cloud
systems like Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud.  Some methods to create such
systems do not fit well with installing the grub-legacy package, as there may
be no MBR available.
 
In Ubuntu, there is a binary package, called grub-legacy-ec2, that provides
kernel hooks and and update script to maintain the menu.lst file when kernels
are changed.  This package is part of the cloud-init source package, but is
unrelated to the upstream cloud-init source.  In Debian, cloud-init will be
maintained in the Python Applications Packaging Team, and grub-legacy-ec2 does
not fit well there, as it is not a python application.

After discussion with the Ubuntu maintainer of the cloud-init package, our plan
is to provide the functions of grub-legacy-ec2 in a separate source package.  I
send this ITP with a more generic name that I feel is more descriptive, unless
it is only useful on the Amazon EC2.  But I am open to keep the original name
if it helps.

People interested in co-maintaining this package, we welcome you.

Currently my plan is to set up a Git repository on collab-maint, with the
grub-legacy-ec2 part of Ubuntu's cloud-init source package as a starting point.
GRUB Maintainers, I would be happy to place the package under your umbrella if
you are intersted.  I would like to interface well with grub2, perhaps through
depending on grub2-common if possible, in order to be co-installable with
grub-pc without diversions.

For those who wonder why this ITP is not about bioinformatics, this is part of
my long-standing goal of developping a fully debian-contained, preseedable, and
unattended procedure to prepare Debian Med images for computer clouds.

(see http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debiâneries/installeur-debian-dans-un-nuage/ ) 

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan