Oh No! Not grub2?!?

[Tom H]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 5:50 PM, Tom Horsley <horsley1953 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

grubby has a "--grub2" flag but it's not (yet) in the man page, so you
don't have to rely on grub-mkconfig/grub2-mkconfig to create menu
entries. I have no idea whether the rest of grub.cfg can be configured
with it.

(In defense of Ubuntu, it's just using the upstream way, just as
Debian - and even Fedora - does when you use
grub-mkconfig/grub2-mkconfig.)