> Also, I firmly believe that we shouldn't be satisfied with flawed solutions > just because they're part of our legacy baggage. We can do better than this > because Free Software is more flexible and more powerful. For example, NetBSD > can distribute its own version of GRUB and patch it, and coordinate an > interface change between GRUB and its kernel, etc.
I think a bootloader with "universal" in its name should be doing everything possible to avoid this. If I want to multiboot between Linux, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD, do I load my MBR with the BSD fork of GRUB, the Linux fork of GRUB, or the Solaris fork of GRUB? This really is a non-solution. I think that defaulting the first parameter to the value used by what, 90% of kernels, but providing a way to override it (I like the variable idea) will be the least surprising for users. The path is filesystem-relative anyway, so GRUB isn't required to know how the kernel names its devices, nor do changes to grub device addressing change the parameter passed. But the current behavior requiring the user to explicitly specify the 0th parameter certainly works, and if the format is to be changed then during the switch from GRUB Legacy to GRUB2 is the ideal time to do it. _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
