Am 20.11.2010 15:25, schrieb Heiko Baums:
Am Sat, 20 Nov 2010 11:27:35 +0100 schrieb Pierre Schmitz <pierre@archlinux.de>:
ATM. we have grub1 in core/base and install that by default. The problem is that this project is virtually dead for a long time now and also not available on x86_64. Technically it has to be in the multilib repo.
I'm running a x86_64 system and have grub1 installed without any lib32 dependencies. So, of course it's available on x86_64. Why shall this be moved to [multilib]?
Grub does not build for x86_64. /sbin/grub: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, for GNU/Linux 2.6.18, stripped Technically, this is very un-Arch-way.
An alternative successor would be extlinux from the syslinux package. It's very simple, easy to configure, actively maintained and reliable. Sure, it only supports booting from ext* and btrfs afaik but to be honest, if you use any other FS you should have a separate /boot even when using grub.
This would be a massive regression because there are several people who are using reiserfs and other filesystems.
I don't even know if installing a bootloader on reiser, jfs or xfs is safe. Just because grub does it, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
The best would be if every available bootloader would be moved to [core] and supported by AIF, so that the user can decide during the installation which bootloader fits best to him and which bootloader shall be installed, because there's currently no bootloader which can do everything.
I don't think it's a good idea to maintain that many bootloaders in core. grub-legacy is unmaintained, lilo has a very old-school design and major disadvantages. We could keep grub2, but it seems it isn't really stable yet.