'password' command in GRUB 2?

[Colin Watson]

Hi,

I was asked today whether GRUB 2 had a 'password' command yet, as it's
more or less the last major feature regression from GRUB Legacy from our
point of view. I see from the Subversion repository that it doesn't yet,
but there have been a number of attempts in the past. Rather than
reinventing the wheel, if we were to look at pushing this up the hill to
inclusion, where would be the best place to start?

Previous attempts I have found:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2007-08/msg00034.html
    "[PATCH] password command implementation", Julien RANC, August 2007
  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2008-05/msg00135.html
    "[RFC] Grub2 lock and password implementation", Julien Ranc, May 2008
  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2008-08/msg00308.html
    "Idea: implementation of the password command", Bean, August 2008
  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2009-02/msg00376.html
    "Menu locks / password authentication", Robert Millan, February 2009

I agreed with Robert in the last link above that it would be best to
implement lock/password first and worry about something more extensible
later if required (on the "you ain't gonna need it" principle), but the
threads on the subject have mostly seemed to end up in interface design
discussions rather than just emulating the working design from GRUB
Legacy (modulo using a non-broken hash function) for now.

Is there still substantial disagreement among the GRUB developers about
this, or would it be worthwhile pursuing something that basically just
does what the GRUB Legacy code did? In that case, it seems that Julien's
code in
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2007-08/msg00034.html, with
the review comments incorporated, would be a reasonable place to start?

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden