[arch-general] deprecate grub (legacy) - opinion?

[KESHAV P.R.]

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.