On Wednesday, June 10 2009, Richard W.M. Jones said: > On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 06:41:55PM +0200, Dennis J. wrote: > > [..] with fedoras "stay close to upstream" mantra. > > I'm glad somebody said it. > > Can someone summarise what the problems are with GRUB2? grub2 is an entirely new codebase and could just as well be called ZXCIVU and be as accurate :-) The only close to connection is that it was originally one of the grub developers working on it, but when I last looked, even that wasn't the case anymore. I need to sit down and figure out where it is in the realm of capability vs our grub[1] these days, but just haven't had enough round 'tuits. Jeremy [1] So, the gory history for those who might be interested. Eight years ago (!), we decided that the advantage of not having to rerun lilo after changing the config file as you can just read the config file off the filesystem with grub was worthwhile. We had, at that point, been patching lilo for quite a while to have a graphical menu. Therefore, keeping a graphical menu was a branding requirement. Connectiva at the time had a patch to grub that worked. We picked it up, shipped it, and it (mostly) worked. Efforts were made to integrate upstream, but they were largely uninterested. Along the way, significant changes to the graphics patch had to be made as grub evolved and a few other efforts were made to push it upstream. Eventually, the answer was "no, we'll do something in the next big version of grub after grub 1.0". Then the main developers went away and we were basically left maintaining a (large at this point) fork. As there is no upstream for grub 0.9x left, we've been left in a position of maintaining it and we've added some real features that have been needed along the way as grub 2's progress has been slow at best and some of the design decisions early on were a bit iffy[2]. And so we are where we are today. If it makes people feel better, we can rename grub to x86bl :-) [2] Caring more about OF boot than a BIOS boot for one notable example that sticks out in my head. But this is 3-4 years ago, so my memory is fuzzy -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
