[Mageia-dev] Support of grub2 in the installer/drakboot

[Per Øyvind Karlsen]

2012/10/8 Manuel Hiebel <manuel.mageia at hiebel.eu>

> Le 08/10/2012 15:27, Nicolas Lécureuil a écrit :
>
>  Hi,
>>
>> is there any plans to add grub2 support ? is there someone already
>> working on
>> it ?
>>
>> regards,
>>
>> Nicolas.
>>
>
> PoK started something in Mandriva with the classical installer, maybe Rosa
> too.
>
Indeed!

While I had hopes of us getting our first beta ready soon, I've decided to
postpone it, very much due to running late with grub2 stuff, which it some
of the features that I have on my *MUSTDO* list and I find crucial to have
ready for deployment in time for a beta candidate.
So far I've only switched the installer to use grub2 (and unfortunately my
work on the installer won't be that easy for you to merge and benefit from
as I've done some heavy work on cleaning up, sanitizing and rewriting the
tools to create the installer in python, for which the python code is
rather modest, but this is very much due to heavy work and improvements on
the distribution core in advance and also tied into various new rpm
functionality that I've implemented myself and that there's been next to
zero interest in from anyone at Mageia. So unfortunately I don't see it as
very realistic to see any of it making it into Mageia, despite the obvious
mutual benefits, poltics keeps getting in the way..

For ROSA they migrated to grub 2 a somewhat while ago, their work can most
likely be picked up and more easily be reused by yourself as the required
changes in drakx has been done already in a drakx branch with relatively
few changes commited to it, likely making it fairly trivial to merge.

Personally I'm not sure if I'll go with the same approach as ROSA and
upstream grub encourages by default, but would rather have a grub
configurantion entry shipped with each kernel package, ie. like a .
/boot/grub2/cfg.d directory where one could put like
/boot/grub2/cfg.d/3.4.1-1.4-desktop.grub which houlds the config with
kernel and initrd images, which gets automatically read by grub without
having to regenerate whole grub2 configuration each time a new package gets
installed.
This would also free one from any special tools and script to handle this
for each and every kernel as is the situation today..
This would also be quite distribution neutral as well. :)

I'm not sure of what use this might actually be or even if any at any sense
for others to try grasp, but I hope to have grub 2 migration more or less
working in a week or so, I've decided to push a second alpha as soon as I'm
done with my work on the installer for this round, then hopefully a beta 2
should be about ready in a couple more weeks or so..

Don't hesitate asking any questions if you have any interest in my work on
these things. :)

--
Regards,
Per Øyvind
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: </pipermail/mageia-dev/attachments/20121010/2e45e640/attachment.html>