[arch-general] [arch-releng] Default Bootloader for AIF

[Dieter Plaetinck]

On Sun, 27 Mar 2011 18:31:13 +0530
"KESHAV P.R." <skodabenz at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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).

I don't care if users break their install if they act like a retard during the installation.
In fact, I'm getting pretty tired of this continued discussion about how we can best spoonfeed such people.  It is just _impossible_ to make any bootloader the "default" for all use cases.

Imho we should just try to list concisely what the options are, and if package maintainers ask me to discourage use of a specific package, I'll do that.  But anything beyond that is optional (and right now, not worth my time) 
We could list them something like:

* grub (supports ext*, vfat, reiserfs, xfs. MBR. chainloading)
* syslinux (supports ext*, vfat, btrfs. GPT/MBR. LVM. no chainloading)
 
> My 2nd question - GPT as default. This requires moving from cfdisk to
> sgdisk/parted usage in the installer.

If I want to support GPT I will need decent utilities from upstream.
I know about parted and sgdisk but I need a toolset for:
- interactive partitioning
- scripted partitioning (for auto-installs)
- the input format for the scripts should be similar/the same whether you use MBR or GPT. 

Basically, if the kernel guys (util-linux) don't care about GPT, I don't think I should either.
I'd rather avoid turning to Gnu (parted) or more obscure (gdisk) upstreams. 
Actually I don't get why there is no GPT support yet it util-linux. Am I missing something?

> 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.

Yeah, archboot is tied to a certain "way of doing things" that's pretty hard to untangle, I think.
Tobias and I have talked about that before, it's definitely not trivial, but it's surely possible.

Dieter