Re: Roadmap for LUA support in GRUB

[Roman Shaposhnik]

Hi!

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 2:41 AM, Felix Zielcke <address@hidden> wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 10.11.2009, 19:38 -0800 schrieb Roman Shaposhnik:
>> Browsing the archives of grub-devel reveals that Lua support was moved to
>> grub-extras which makes me ask these two questions:
>>     1. Was the decision to move Lua based exclusively on the licensing 
>> concerns?
>
> I don't think it was exclusively only decided because of the license,
> but this is the top reason for it.

I'd appreciated knowing non-licensing reasons as well.

On the licensing front, though, what was an actual issue there?
After all, Lua has a respectable FOSS license and I'm sure there's tons of
MIT-licensed software in Debian. What made Lua different?

>>     2. Is there any hope of ever seeing GRUB v2 + Lua in major distributions
>>         once they start adopting GRUB v2 as a default boot loader?
>
> Convince the major distributions that integrating lua in their builds is
> a good reason.

That, of course, always works -- but I was hoping to find out why maintainers
feel unconvinced ;-)

> lua.mod IIRC was 99K big and it was always included into the floppy
> rescue images.

99K doesn't seem to be a lot compared to other auxiliary modules I find
in /boot/grub on my Ubuntu.

To some extent, that's exactly the reason of my frustration -- saving 99K
on a partition full of all sorts of stuff hardly justifies withholding a useful
feature. Don't take it the wrong way, though, this frustration is totally
misplaced on grub-devel, but to some extent had Lua module been part
of the core GRUB v2 I'm pretty sure distribution maintainers wouldn't have
thrown it out.

Thanks,
Roman.