On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 15:01, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter@plaetinck.be> wrote:
Hi Keshav, thanks for this overview.
My notes: - grub-legacy is tricky to setup (from an aif POV, not from a user POV) - I accept patches for grub2 if they are reasonably sane/elegant
From your overview, as well as Pierres first thread (and the responses to that), it seems all 3 bootloaders have something about them that makes them more suited for specific use cases, and less so for other cases. So none is clearly superior or inferior then the others, it all depends on the circumstances.
Yes, it depends on use case and personal opinion. KISS=syslinux all-in-one functionality and exotic configurations=grub2 . I did not include LILO in this list since i have never used it.
So, for the AIF perspective, I would say "which should be the default?" is an irrelevant question, the important thing is, we support two (and later maybe 3) and the user can choose.
So, maybe this is a question that should be answered by the package maintainers: because the order in which we list bootloader selection (i.e. which is at the top, the "default") will probably steer -to some extent- package usage and bug reports; which bootloader do you feel most comfortable with maintaining?
This is really question about users who do not care about what bootloader they have in their system and simply select the 1st one in the menu. Especially true in case of newbies (most of them). Definitely syslinux and grub2 are here to stay. The question is about grub-legacy. We should ask Ronald (pressh) whether he is ready to maintain grub (now that the last fork of it is being abandoned) and bug-fix and maintain patches for it. I am sure once fedora jumps to grub2, no one will care about grub and there wont be any patches from anyone for any feature/bugfix. I am sure of this because fedora is moving to btrfs as default rootfs and its the reason they are (finally) deprecating grub-legacy, instead of adding btrfs support to it (like they did for ext4). My suggestion is if the grub-legacy maintainer is not ready to continue maintaining it and if no other dev wants to maintain it, bring out a news announcing no more bug-reports (aka dev support) for grub-legacy and move it to community or AUR. I know it is strange for a package to go from core directly to AUR, but the official upstream for grub-legacy never existed for four years. If any user want to use it, they can take it from AUR and I am sure some user will maintain it for foreseeable future while the devs can be relieved off the job.
The answer is very likely syslinux. Allan, Thomas, other maintainers/developers?
My 2nd question - GPT as default. This requires moving from cfdisk to sgdisk/parted usage in the installer. I tried looking in aif for adding grub2 support and i thought of copying relevant code from archboot and modifying it to use libui-sh . But there are few other issues like partition alignment, bios boot partition (grub2-bios in GPT) and EFI system partition (for any efi bootloader including grub2-efi - only GPT) which require use of gnu parted over sfdisk/cfdisk. Anyway I cant promise a time frame for coming out with patches. I am not so well versed in git for that matter. I was actually thinking of merging archboot's /arch/setup features and fixes into aif and make archboot use aif (where archboot uses initramfs type iso and archiso uses squashfs type iso). Archboot setup has all the partitioning and bootloader fixes requires but too bloated and seems almost impossible to port to libui-sh and aif. Regards. Keshav