Re: Is grub perfect? (was Re: Does LXDE really require lightdm?)
On Sat 28 Jun 2014 at 09:00:30 +0200, Thierry de Coulon wrote:
> On Saturday 28 June 2014 05.55:39 Rusi Mody wrote:
> > PS. No I am not defending grub2 -- I find its documentation almost
> > non-existent -- just my survival strategies :-)
>
>
> Yes, this is one problem. There are others:
20 man pages and an info manual amounts to non-existent documentation?
> - what documentation is existent is not easy to undestand, syntax is
> complicated. Trial and error is not good when you're playing with your boot
> manager.
A better case would be made by giving examples of hard to understand
passages and complicated syntax.
> - Grub ('s developpers) is patronizing: why make it so difficult to install on
> a partition? To tell you it's not reliable is one thing, to try and forbid it
> is another.
Having a "--force" option to grub-install doesn't look like an attempt
to forbid installing to a partition.
> - Assuming that UUIDs are "better" is just one way to look at it. That's right
> for people who add disks to a computer. Clone a disk and you'll be happy
> you used labels
UUIDs are good for everyone. You give a decent example where labels are
very useful, but they are not guaranteed to exist as most users do not
allocate one to a filesystem. Therefore, it wouldn't be very clever for
update-grub to rely on them to produce grub.cfg. Some filesystems do not
have a UUID (iso9660, for example), so --label or --file are the only
options available then.
> While I do see the power of Grub 2, I too wish we could go back to the
> efficience and simplicity of Grub 1.
Nothing to stop you:
apt-get install grub-legacy
> And I don't know if this is Grub or the distribution, but I've regularely
> experienced "MS-like" behaviour: you tell the installer to put Grub on the
> root partition, but it does install on your MBR.
grub-install /dev/sda1
didn't do as instructed? Bug number?
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