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Re: reasons to ditch LILO before upgrading to jessie?



On Thu 07 Jul 2016 at 08:33:57 (+0200), tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 06, 2016 at 02:23:39PM -0500, Don Armstrong wrote:
> > On Wed, 06 Jul 2016, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> > > YMMV, I find it impenetrable.
> > 
> > I'm assuming you mean the generated configuration? It's literally just
> > some boilerplate [...]
> 
> Let's make it impenetrable boilerplate, then.
> 
> FWIW, I concur with Jonathan. While I actively worked on my lilo.conf,
> since grub (espeecially -2), I try to avoid touching the conf.
> 
> Wonderfully general, but (for me) wonderfully unusable.
> 
> Now don't get me wrong: without Grub, my box wouldn't boot, and chances
> are that the "legacy" emulation of whatever monster bios is in there
> is so buggy that Lilo wouldn't cope: therefore I am still full of thanks
> and praise for the Grub authors for their hard work.
> 
> Still I do disagree on many of its design principles.

Well, I think it's a shame that there isn't a
GRUB_ENABLE_LINUX_LABEL=true
along with the GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID parameter.
I did take a look at the scripts with a view to hacking one into
shape, but it struck me that it would be harder to maintain it
unless it got incorporated upstream than what I eventually did.
Even if I succeeded in writing it.

So I took the easier course of writing a python script to read
/run/udev/data/b* and replace the --fs-uuid UUIDs in /boot/grub/grub.cfg
with --label LABELs. Along the way, it also prettifies the menu
strings and adds an fsck entry which I can call with
grub-reboot 'fsck>fsck'
(Again, I don't know why the scripts don't do this themselves.)
I keep a before/after copy so that, whenever grub or a kernel is
updated, I can copy the 'after' file if the 'before' compares equal.

I don't think the scripts are much harder to understand than those
in /etc/init.d/ which regularly come up here when people try to
hack their own.

Cheers,
David.


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