Grub installation. First potential Fedora killer

[Harald Hoyer]

On 01/10/2014 11:57 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-01-09 at 14:30 +0100, Harald Hoyer wrote:
>> On 01/02/2014 11:32 PM, Jean François Martinez wrote:
>>> I have a nice booter setup and a nice _main_ Linux installation.  Last thing
>>>  I would want is a distribution I am _testing_, that is Fedora 20 forces on 
>>> me it will be my main installation and forces me to choose between installing
>>> Grub on the MBR or not at all.
>>>
>>> In addition it didn't detect my other Linux installation so at first boot I 
>>> was only able to choose between Fedora 20 and Fedora 20.  Fortunately running
>>> grub-install fixed it (ie this time my other installations were detected).
>>> Sort of.  First of all because Fedora 20, ie a ditribution I was _testing_
>>> was now the default and second of all because every time I upgrade the kernel
>>> of my _main_ distribution I am supposed to reboot on F20 and run 
>>> grub-install.  Great.  Nothing I can't fix but your average Ubuntu or Suse 
>>> user will just cancel installation as soon he notices F20 is going to force 
>>> itself on his MBR.  And if the road is a one way one between Fedora and 
>>> Ubintu then  it is doomed.
>>>
>>
>> That's the reason we came up with
>> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/
>>
>> and even have a patch for grub2
>> http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/grub2.git/tree/0460-blscfg-add-blscfg-module-to-parse-Boot-Loader-Specif.patch
>>
>> If all bootloaders would follow the spec, nothing has to be configured manually
>> and would just use the dropin directories.
> 
> So what's the hold-up?
> 

For Fedora, it's the grub maintainer thinking, that you cannot add directories
in the EFI partition without registering the name, although it's only required
for subdirs in the /EFI top-level directory.