Re: disk vs partition numbering

[Hollis Blanchard]

On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 23:46 +0100, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> 
> The critical thing is how to reduce new things that people would have to 
> study 
> for using a program. GRUB Legacy made a mistake, since nearly all operating 
> systems use 0-based for disks, and 1-based for partitions.

Since I'm used to Linux, which assigns disks letters rather than
numbers, I was unaware that other OSs like BSD number disks from 0.
Since that's the case, and neither 0 nor 1 will make sense to people
expecting "a", I'm OK with 0.

> Now, some people say that this is inconsistent against GRUB Legacy. OK. I 
> admit it. But which is more important in a long run: easy for existing users 
> to migrate to GRUB 2, or easy for new comers to adapt GRUB 2? How difficult 
> is it that existing users know GRUB now follows the same rule as others? How 
> difficult is it that beginners study a rule different from others, so not 
> intuitive at all?

Yes, I definitely agree with the decision to number partitions from 1.
(Hopefully we can do the same with menu entries too. :) Making this
change at a time when the config file syntax changes is the only good
opportunity.

-Hollis