Top posting - because answer is general to all the emails to list:
1) My focus was on Eli Schwartz e-mail, where he mentioned about his
proposed changes to Grub Wiki.
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2018-December/045830.html
2) I even said that grub-mkconfig should NOT be default. But from Wiki
point of view should be above manual grub.cfg section.
3) Unfortunately instead of acknowledging that I am giving my opinion,
he started accusing me of being more or less anti-Arch person. God knows
why he needed to do that. But anyway, I dont mind.
4) Existing Grub wiki already has custom grub.cfg section which I
believe is good enough and well written and ordered after grub-mkconfig
related section.
5) Eli Schwartz Grub wiki, in its current state, is confusing. I would
rather read official Grub manual if I had to read all that detail about
what each keyword means. Its no way close to custom grub.cfg section
that already exists with nice example entries.
6) Every software has bugs - just because grub-mkconfig has some bug
reports it does not mean its not suitable tool for this purpose.
@Eli - Do not get offended please. Just my honest opinion about your
proposed changes.
Regards,
Amish
On 09/12/18 8:23 am, Ralf Mardorf via arch-general wrote:
On Sun, 9 Dec 2018 07:56:29 +0530, Amish via arch-general wrote:
Thats because you have assumed that people will install only Linux.
And that too plain Linux.
Chainloading e.g. FreeBSD, Windows or whatsoever is even simpler.
And that too no grub modules. No fancy stuff.
That too no failsafe stuff. Or LTS stuff. etc. etc.
You could add all of this, but you only need to do it one time, not
after each upgrade of a kernel.
Now if you have to hand write grub.cfg considering all of the above, I
dont think its as easy as 4 lines above.
It still is, just a few additional lines are needed.
And I bet if you recommend above 4 lines to a normal user, he is going
to make spelling mistake even in above 4 lines that you have given.
If this happens to me, I simply correct the spelling mistake.
Or forget starting or ending braces some where or forget new line.
And then have a broken system in the end.
This doesn't happen often and if it happens, it could be easily fixed
with an editor.
I am not saying dont write grub.conf on your own. I am saying that
recommend tools first because tools are well tested and probes things
much better.
If above 4 lines sufficed everyone and all cases - then yes its easy.
But from user manual point of view you can not recommend hand written
grub first.
You don't mention all the failures of that os-prober and the other
thingies.
Some people don't want any fancy stuff at all, but a menu order that
fits to their needs, so they would have to edit the configs for all
those auto-crap. On my machine I've seen auto-generated menus with
entries for installs that don't exist, after waiting several minutes to
generate a grub.cfg, that could be edited manually in a few seconds,
without this kind of mistakes.
