Re: [RFC] Don't pass filename in multiboot command line

[Robert Millan]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 12:21:01PM +0100, Thomas Schwinge wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 05:20:09PM +0200, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
> > Committed with improvements as ACK'ed by Robert on IRC
> 
> I wasted at least half of a working day due to this change!  (As well as
> others wasted time, who where trying to help me.)
> 
> Don't get me wrong -- in principle I agree with this change, but what I
> do not agree with is simply, silently! changing this behavior: you know,
> there are systems that rely on the previous behavior, such as GNU/Hurd,
> or the issue I was struggling with, Xen, as reported in this thread,
> <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-xen-devel/2009-October/002479.html>,
> and finally here: <http://bugs.debian.org/557645>.
> 
> I have been looking in a lot of places (initramsfs, udev, lvm, ...) what
> was possibly going wrong, but would not have expected that GRUB's module
> would suddenly change its behavior.  Heck, I'm even on the grub-devel
> mailing list, but I can't afford to read its hundreds of messages every
> week.
> 
> ``There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.'' of course, but
> please think about the consequences before doing such incompatible
> changes in the future.

You're right.  We should have documented this better.  Perhaps by mentioning
it in NEWS and in the release announcement.  Sorry about that.

> Wouldn't it have been possible to use something like ``module --arg0 FILE
> ARG0 ARG1 ...'', and ``module FILE ARG1 ...''  defaulting to ``module
> --arg0 FILE FILE ARG1 ...''?

We don't like to carry legacy baggage.  Backward compatibility may be fine
to keep around for a while in some cases, but in this one there really was
no sane way to do it.

> PS: In general, thanks for the work all of you are doing with maintaining
>     GRUB!

You're welcome.

-- 
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."