grub / grub2 conflicts

[Richard W.M. Jones]

This is about:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=737261
"F16 TC2 DVD grub/grub2 conflict"

The grub package in F16 has a "Conflicts: grub2" line.  There are no
actual file conflicts, but this was added in order to workaround some
bugs in grubby, including:

- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=725185
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=731226

Now the problem is that libguestfs provides a way for people to use
grub-install (and in the future grub2-install) on guests.  Think for
example if you had a mix of Fedora 15 and Fedora 16 guests on your
host.

libguestfs, as I guess is well known, uses tools from the host in
order to manage guests.  This is done so that we don't have to
separately package all the tools, which would be a security headache
(if there's a security issue discovered in grub-install, just updating
the host package is enough to fix it -- you don't have to track down a
separate copy statically bundled in libguestfs).

Even if you don't care about libguestfs, you might well wish to
loop-mount an old guest and run grub-install --root-directory=...  on
it.

So I propose that we drop this conflicts and fix grubby instead.

However the maintainer of grub is unwilling to do this, which is why
I've escalated this issue here.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v