Re: Roadmap for LUA support in GRUB

[Roman Shaposhnik]

Hi!

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko
<address@hidden> wrote:
>> I'd appreciated knowing non-licensing reasons as well.
>>
> The only other reason was to encourage developpement of sh-like scripting.

Fair enough. Would it be, then, fair to say that Lua was never meant to be
a scripting engine for GRUB, but was more of an oddity?

I was pretty excited when it first made its way into GRUB simply because it is
such a delight to do scripting in. Don't get me wrong, but compared to Lua
sh-like scripting feels like hard labor :-(

>> 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?
>>
> GNU isn't Debian. GNU has a very strong copyright policy and for code to
> become GNU it usually has to be copyright-assigned to FSF. It's not the
> case of LUA. So we created grub-extras specifically to hold code which
> is perfectly legal, free and GPLv3-compatible but not suitable for GNU.
> Any distribution which doesn't have anything against code not being
> copyrighted by FSF shouldn't have any reason not to add grub-extras

Got it! This makes perfect sense.

Thanks,
Roman.