update-grub again (Re: ping (update-grub2))

[Robert Millan]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 11:20:06PM +0100, Vincent Pelletier wrote:
> > That said, if you don't like the idea then we could proceed adding it in
> > debian, but that might close the door to merging in the future (maintaining
> > the script in debian ourselves implies accepting contributions from many
> > people without any paperwork arrangements).
> 
> Personally, the way update-grub works on all my applicable debian installs 
> suits me perfectly.

When you just run it and see it works, everything seems wonderful.  But have
a look at the code; everyone has been adding their cruft for ages, and it's
completely unmanageable now.  By taking a modular approach, we can have a
simple core that is easily maintainable, and unload the responsability for
modules to the applications they're associated with.

> But as Declan said, it's bad to overwrite the file...
> I wonder if it could become just a generation of a file which would be 
> included (or not) by the "main" config file.
> If that main config file does not exist at all, it could be generated - 
> unless 
> we consider that a user might want not to have a config file at all.
> 
> I don't know if the current scripting allows this, I haven't put an eye on it 
> for a looong time.

I'm not particularly interested about that, but it's trivial to implement it
later provided that grub scripting supports it.

> Another idea, which I just had while writing this mail :
> 
> What about putting the .d directory in /boot(/grub) and implementing a 
> mechanism in grub to be able to handle such configuration directory ?

That's not feasible.  The script modules do complex stuff that couldn't
be done comfortably if we were in kernel-mode C instead of shell scripting
(check out what my scripts do and you'll see what I mean).

-- 
Robert Millan

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