grub2 confusion

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2011-10-06 at 16:17 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Oct 2011 22:09:44 +0200
> Michael Schwendt wrote:
> 
> > there are lame and
> > dubious attempts at defending the symlink.
> 
> When the really indefensible thing is that you have to run
> a stupid script to generate the file in the first place.
> It should be edited directly, not composed from scattered
> parts by a silly script. Cast your mind back to the lilo
> versus grub debate - 99% of the popularity of grub was
> because you didn't have to remember to run a stupid
> program after making changes for those changes to
> take effect.
> 
> If the syntax is too complicated for it to be edited
> by mere mortals, that just says the syntax should be
> a lot simpler, not that an extra tool ought to exist
> to build the file from parts.

the problem is that we're not the grub developers, we can't control
this.

at a high level, Fedora has an unfortunate choice:

1) use grub-legacy, which actually does pretty much everything we need
quite well, and is nice and simply engineered, but is not maintained
upstream, so we get to do all the maintenance on it

2) use grub2, which is supported upstream, but is arguably massively
over-engineered and unnecessarily complex compared to grub-legacy

3) use something else; there isn't really anything else that's as
capable and robust as either grub

none of the options is ideal. We're switching from 1) to 2) because the
pain of maintaining grub-legacy ourselves is becoming greater than the
pain of dealing with grub2's belt, britches, suspenders, shotgun and
kitchen sink design philosophy.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net