Re: [RFC] grub-install C rewrite

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 03:08:54PM +0200, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko 
wrote:
> Hello, all. Recently I made some order in hostdisk.c and getroot.c
> involving splitting in OS-specific parts.
> In the same time I added WinAPI version of getroot/hostdisk allowing
> grub-probe to work on windows natively
> Also on-going is AROS-specific parts.
> Windows and AROS are not friendly with bash.
> The attempt to make both multiple files of same type work and handling
> whitespaces/newlines/... in filenames would result in very ugly code
> with loads of evals.
> Current code may have subtle assumptions on behaviour of common tools
> like sed and on locale (E.g. "[a-z]" doesn't cover u if locale is Estonian).
> So to check viability I rewrote grub-install in C. This is mostly proof
> of concept with loads of FIXMEs but I could boot i386-pc install made
> with it. In many aspects (static variables, some tests, general
> structure) it's reminiscent of sh version of grub-install it's based on.
> Some functionality is likely to stay OS-specific, e.g. executing
> compressors or determining firmware.
> 
> I'd like to know the opinion of other people on possible switchover. If
> switched then it'll have to be all grub-install, grub-mkrescue,
> grub-mknetdir and grub-mkstandalone.
> I'd like to hear from other people.

Given the number of times I have had to edit grub-install in the past to
get it to work right on a powerpc machine (I think it is now working OK),
I would hate to have had that be C code.  After all it really is mainly
a wrapper around other grub tools.

I think windows not having bash is a rather low priority to most people
compared to actually be able to work with grub on the platforms where
it is pretty much the only choice.

So personally, based on my experience, I hate this idea.

-- 
Len Sorensen