Re: [RFC 1/1] mkimage: revert "Align efi sections on 4k boundary"

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 4/19/19 9:11 PM, Jesús Diéguez Fernández wrote:
>> /PS : may be making a summary of all architectures/configurations tests
>> tutorials would be useful ? Even if it's just QEMU (it would even be a
>> lot of work), and used on new releases or wide changes, or just from
>> time to time to see if no accident happened in any recent changes. It
>> would also be an awesome tutorial for people starting to deal with grub/
>>
> 
> As a complete newbie, I can confirm that this is a real need. I recently
> contributed a small modification and didn't know exactly which
> compilation options I should enable. I finally used a configuration I
> found elsewhere, but that's inconsistent if the official way ignores
> some warnings or the other way around, treats all warnings as errors.

Well, since it's open source, anyone is invited to make something like
that happen. If you think it would be great to have a detailed set
of documentation which explains how to build GRUB for the various
configurations, you are welcome to send in a patch or set up a wiki.

> I know that recently a travis configuration file was added to test that
> GRUB builds fine on different platforms. I think that improving it has
> more value than just creating a plain text documentation.

If you really want to make thorough testing, you would also need to cross-
compile the various targets and architectures which is certainly quite
an involved task. An alternative would be to regularly create snapshots
on Debian, e.g. for a Debian package called "grub-git". Or compile
pseudo-natively with the help of QEMU which supports all GRUB targets
except for IA64.

> The travis integration requires that the code must be hosted on github
> (or setup something like this https://stackoverflow.com/a/49019950 ).
> Would it be possible to set a remote copy of GRUB's repository on
> github? I mean, not my personal copy, but an official mirror, something
> like the linux kernel has.

Alex has already set up a Travis environment for GRUB, see:

> https://travis-ci.org/agraf/grub/

> That would allow anyone to make trivial forks on their github account
> that can be tested with travis. To deal with the PR submissions on
> github, the kernel has a bot that automatically replies to people (see
> this example
> https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/663#issuecomment-474615610 ).

To be fair, I think proper testing of GRUB can only be done when
deployed on an actual target. It's also not really a beginner's
project anyway, so I think people who send in patches should also
be responsible for testing their changes thoroughly.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - address@hidden
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - address@hidden
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