grub.cfg and core.img getting out of sync

[Colin Watson]

I'm having persistent problems with grub.cfg and core.img getting out of
sync. The usual pattern is:

  * Some shiny new feature appears in core.img
  * We extend grub-mkconfig to use it
  * User runs update-grub but not grub-install (historically a perfectly
    sane thing to do, and indeed basically standard practice)
  * grub either falls over at boot or does something odd

This just bit me again today, and if it bites me it's going to bite the
users of the packages I upload too.

Is there any way we can do better? One thing I was thinking of is that
Ubuntu's carried a patch to GRUB Legacy for some time that stores the
package version at the point when grub-install was last run in
/boot/grub/installed-version. If we did something like that, then
grub-mkconfig could carry a bit of conditional code that says "only use
this feature if the installed version of GRUB is at least <foo>".
grub-mkconfig would end up carrying a bit of bloat, but at least the
bloat is in /usr, and I'm assuming that at this point things are stable
enough that we won't be talking about *too* many changes.

What do people think about this general approach?

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden