grub legacy is all that will install on my amd k8 computer for some strange reason at least according to debian when I try upgrading grub. On Mon, 4 Apr 2011, KESHAV P.R. wrote:
Hi all, I want your opinion regarding whether grub-legacy (core/grub) package should be deprecated (downgrade it to extra/community/AUR) now that syslinux is in core. THe actual upstream has been dead for 4 years and every fork (grub4dos, super grub disk, grub-fedora) is either lacking in functionality (read: GPT and such support) or being deprecated themselves in favour of grub2. Although grub does support gpt via a patch (not currently in the grub package), syslinux and grub2's gpt support is much better. The background of this message is the 'Default Bootloader in AIF' topic in arch-releng. My views regarding grub-legacy and syslinux are at http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-releng/2011-March/001609.html and Dieter's reply at http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-releng/2011-March/001610.html.
I mainly want the opinion of Ronald Van Haren (pressh - i hope i got the name right) (core/grub maintainer), and also other devs and TU's regarding whether this should be done. If it is not a problem for any dev or TU to maintain patches, should any of the grub-legacy fork(s) be deprecated, then its okay to leave the package as it is. But if it is a problem to maintain the package, in the light of gpt, btrfs, nilfs2 and all other FS and partition table problems (with grub-legacy) it should be deprecated IMO.
Most of the advantages listed for grub-legacy are true for syslinux too, except multi-partition booting support (syslinux is limited to the partition from which it is booted). The decision taken by dev regarding this will (to some extent) determine the default bootloader supported in aif, and subsequently the bug-reports etc. If multi-partition support if needed, the user can use grub2-bios>=1.99~rc1 which is superior to grub2<=1.98 and also includes a menu.lst to grub.cfg conversion utility (in grub2-common package).
Regards.
Keshav
PS: This can be considered analogous to grnome3 replacing gnome2 in the repos although some people don't like it, since it is the policy of Arch to package the latest release versions, in which case grub should have been out of the repos a long time ago.