Increase grub timeout

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-05-18 at 15:43 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 10:34:22AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
> 
> > Of course it shouldn't be zero. This is what I was saying yesterday. Now
> > if Fedora is really targeting end users who are non-technical (can we
> > decide this finally, sometime, please?) then this is valid. But if it's
> > true that we favor experienced computing users, it should not be zero.
> 
> The logic here is unclear. Technical users are surely the ones most able 
> to deal with this situation? I'll point out here that Windows gives no 
> visible prompt to obtain bootup options and the world doesn't seem to 
> have ended

I always enjoy the 'it's okay, everyone, we only have to be as good as
Windows!' argument. =)

Indeed the world hasn't ended, but certainly a lot of us get called
halfway across town on weekends to 'fix the computer' in this sort of
case.

>From a later post of yours:

"If you're unable to 
get to grub at all without setting a timeout then that's something that 
needs fixing, but we're better off exploring *why* your machine is 
behaving differently rather than bandaiding over it with a timeout and 
prompt."

We can only take this Fedora principle so far. There are many bits of
code in the kernel which work around broken ACPI / BIOS behaviour (as
you well know, sorry for the egg-sucking lesson). If we were being
really annoying literalists we (well, rather 'kernel developers' than
'we', but many of them are Fedora / RH people) would never do this; we'd
close all the bugs with a note to the reporter to go and get their
motherboard manufacturer to fix it. Being sensible people, we recognize
there really *is* a limit to the 'we shouldn't work around brokenness'
argument, and it comes when the brokenness is in the hands of such
capricious souls as hardware manufacturers. The systems where holding
down a key during boot doesn't bring up grub are badly designed systems,
this is perfectly true. But still, the sensible path is to make
reasonable accommodations for this sort of thing. Let's face it, if
we're waiting on Sony or HP to fix this, we'll be waiting a while.

Another +1 for Bill's suggestion, that seems like a nice elegant way of
trying to catch the broken cases.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net