Re: Solving the grub-pe2elf problem

[Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko]

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Robert Millan<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I thought of a possible solution to the grub-pe2elf problem.  It seems that
> it is burdensome to produce ELF binaries on Windows, but building PE binaries
> or even PE/win32 executables on GNU/Linux is not (thanks to Mingw32 toolchain
> which is available on most distributions).
>
> If building GRUB with "./configure --host=i586-mingw32msvc" works, we could
> include win32 binaries in the upcoming 1.97 release.  Other GNU projects do
> this as well.  Then we could drop support for toolchains that lack ELF.
>
I don't think that dropping useful features just for the sake of code
to look nice is a good thing. End users wouldn't care if you supply
binaries with or without compilable sources. But you don't let them to
exercise freedom. You can argue that you don't restrict their freedom
it's true but many people may need to taste freedom on a small thing
before changing to (w)holly free system. And this approach attracts
developpers. When I was speaking with developpers around Darwin they
specifically wanted to compile grub with toolchain they already have.
It's why I bothered at all to make grub compilable with Apple
toolchain (I'm personally fine with compiling it from Linux or
FreeBSD). I'm aware of few coders on different skill levels who are
now "tasting" grub and who wouldn't have if I haven't done it
> It probably doesn't currently build this way, because win32 won't have all
> the functions we need, but this can be fixed by importing them from Gnulib,
> the GNU compatibility library.
>
> Christian and Bean, are you interested in implementing this?
>
> Other maintainers, is it burdensome to any of you to include these binaries
> in official builds?  I suppose it's not, since mingw32 packages are widely
> available, but it doesn't hurt to ask :-)
>
> --
> Robert Millan
>
>  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
>  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
>  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."
>
>
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>



-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko

Personal git repository: http://repo.or.cz/w/grub2/phcoder.git