Re: [gentoo-dev] grub:2 keywords

[Mike Gilbert]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 11:32 AM, Mike Frysinger <vapier@g.o> wrote:
> On Friday 29 June 2012 01:59:37 Mike Gilbert wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 1:13 AM, Mike Frysinger <vapier@g.o> wrote:
>> > On Monday 25 June 2012 00:15:59 Mike Gilbert wrote:
>> >> An official release of grub-2.00 should be coming pretty soon. I would
>> >> like to keyword this for ~amd64 and ~x86 shortly after it hits the tree.
>> >> I don't do much work on base system packages, so I would like some
>> >> advice on how to make this as smooth as possible.
>> >>
>> >> My main concern is that many people probably have sys-boot/grub in
>> >> @world. If grub:2 is made visible, portage will install it, and will
>> >> remove grub-0.97 on the next depclean. This could be a little confusing,
>> >> but should not cause any immediate damage since the copy of grub-0.97
>> >> installed in the MBR and /boot would remain intact.
>> >>
>> >> Is this worthy of a news item? Or I just blog about it?
>> >>
>> >> Anything else I need to think about here?
>> >
>> > do we have automatic migration/updating in place like with grub1 ?  that
>> > was the biggest reason i didn't unleash it for automatic installing on
>> > people's systems.
>>
>> No, the grub2 ebuild does not automatically install the files in /boot.
>>
>> grub2-install performs this step, and must be run by the user. It also
>> installs the MBR and embeds the core image in unused disk sectors.
>> This way the MBR/core image is always kept in sync with the files in
>> /boot/grub2.
>>
>> I don't really see a way to reliably call grub2-install from the
>> ebuild, and I think this would be a bit unfriendly to the user anyway.
>
> grub1 doesn't seem to have a problem auto-updating itself.  why is grub2 any
> different ?
> -mike

As far as I can tell, grub:0 only half-way updates itself; there is a
large ewarn telling the user that they must take action to install the
new version in the MBR. This seems a bit broken to me.