Oh No! Not grub2?!?

[Tom Horsley]

I noticed to my horror in another thread today that
fedora 16 is going to switch to grub2.

I hope it is packaged and updated totally differently
from the version in ubuntu, because the ubuntu
version is a nightmare.

Do we still have to edit random files then run
update-grub to build the actual config file
via preprocessed fragments?

I think grub2 would be fine if it worked exactly
like grub, with a one and only config file you
could edit by hand or kernel updates could modify
directly with a tool like grubby.

With separate files to edit and changes not taking
effect till you run an update script, we have reverted
back to the stone age of lilo. It is absolutely
irrelevant that lilo needed to run an update tool
for a completely different reason, the plain fact
is that lilo died primarily because grub did not
need a separate update step, and therefore there was
nothing to forget to do after modifying the boot
config.

Worse yet (on ubuntu anyway) many things are not
configurable via the config file intended to be
edited by humans, so you wind up needing to edit
random files you aren't intended to edit. Files
that are likely to erase your changes when an
update for grub2 itself is installed.

For example: The "helpful" code to prevent automatic
booting when a previous boot failed. If you have
a machine with no access to the boot console,
now it will never boot again (even if the previous
boot problem was something external to the machine
that is now fixed). There is no way to disable
this "helpful" feature of grub2 in any of the
ifdefs, you have to go off and modify files you
aren't supposed to be looking at.

I'm begging you here: Provide a new grubby2 tool
to edit the one true config file if you must. Allow
me to edit the one true config file by hand, but
do not stick with the abomination that is preprocessed
bits and pieces needing to be jammed together with
a separate update step. Nothing good will come of
it.