Re: RFC: 1.97 roadmap

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 06:10:40PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> I think it's time we begin the discussion on GRUB 1.97.  What do we want to
> see in it, and a rough schedule.  1.97 is meant to be a point release, without
> any major changes (I mean, except for those we already have ;-)), and it 
> should
> happen soon (like this month or so).

Robert asked me on IRC about Ubuntu's release schedule. Our feature
freeze is 27 August; after that I can squeeze in bug-fixes but it gets
progressively harder. I understand that 1.97 is probably not feasible by
then; if we have an up-to-date snapshot at that point then I can
probably manage to justify resyncing at least some newer snapshots up to
24 September (beta freeze).

> Here's what I'd like to see included:
> 
>   - Low memory heap (useful to move code off kern/i386/pc/startup.S).
>   - Authentication support (even if it only supports passwords initially).
>   - Gettext.
>   - Integrated "hiddenmenu" functionality.
>   - Other cleanups, like Vladimir's video split.

I think my list is as follows:

  * Authentication, for parity with GRUB Legacy (i.e. passwords only
    would be fine).

  * Integrated hiddenmenu.
    Mark asked me yesterday if there was anything we could do to have
    "sleep" detect key state (ideally a shift key state rather than
    Escape) rather than having to wait for a key press, so that the
    timeout could be reduced to zero in our configuration; if anyone has
    any bright ideas about the keyboard layer then this would be very
    nice.

  * Some way to support a quieter boot when the menu isn't being
    displayed, without the status messages as GRUB loads
    (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/386922). I
    don't at all mind if this isn't the default, as I understand that
    there are debugging considerations; being able to check a shift key
    state would help here.

  * Unicode menu font by default. (I believe this is done.) The driver
    for this is from some of our OEM distributors, so while Gettext
    support would be nice we can certainly cope without it by having our
    custom engineering people just drop in alternative text, since the
    OEM typically knows what locale they're shipping to.

  * grub-reboot and grub-set-default. While it does look as though we
    can put this together using grub-editenv, grub-mkconfig will need to
    support it.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden