[gentoo-amd64] Re: reinstall grub after an emerge?

[Duncan]

Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> posted
5bdc1c8b0905202028r598f7b1ch99ccbd46ee937068@××××××××××.com, excerpted
below, on  Wed, 20 May 2009 20:28:37 -0700:

> I agree that it's not a package that is likely to make much of a
> difference in the performance of my machine, once it's booted, and if it
> boots then why upgrade.
>
> I'm going to throw in a package mask unless I here a really good reason
> not to.

As long as your disks and filesystems remain the same and were working, 
yeah, no big reason to upgrade grub.

HOWEVER, if you are playing with or intend to play with any of the new 
ext3/ext4 features (like extents) on your /boot partition, or if you are 
using filesystems larger than some size (IDR what, 512 GB maybe?), which 
isn't likely with a separate /boot but might be if you have your entire 
system as a single partition, THEN the newly updated/patched grub becomes 
important, since the old version didn't understand all these new 
features, with the result being a possibly unbootable system if you 
started using them.

Actually, the old pre-1.0 grub is deprecated upstream and they aren't 
adding all these new features as they are busy trying to get grub-2.0 out 
stable and out the door -- with these new features and more.  But that 
leaves all the distributions including Gentoo between a rock and a hard 
place, with (at least as of when I read about it probably Q3 last year) 
the pre-2.0s not even feature frozen yet let alone stable, but the old 
pre-1.0s (they never shipped a full 1.0 as they decided they'd made too 
many mistakes and went right for the target-2.0 rewrite) are deprecated 
and not getting any new features.  So the distributions must come up 
with, test and include their own patches to the old deprecated 0.97.  
Fortunately it's freedomware we're talking, so they not only can do just 
that, but all the distributions share the work/testing/patches around, so 
no one's left trying to do it all themselves.  But that's why we've been 
on grub-0.97 "forever", with more and more -rX revisions, as the patches 
stack up to keep modern systems actually /working/ with it.

But as of whenever I read about it last year, they were finally supposed 
to get pre-grub-2.0 into feature-freeze sometime late last year, and 
presumably, there'll be an upstream 2.0 release sometime this year.  Then 
the early distribution testing begins, with any additional patches they 
think they need, before it hits unstable, and eventually stable.  /That/ 
might be worth upgrading too when it happens, because it's supposed to be 
a serious leap, near as much as between lilo and grub, but there's 
certain to be a Gentoo upgrade guide for it before it goes stable, 
telling you how to make and test an alternate boot floppy/CD/thumb-drive, 
which is what people will need to do just to be sure, and then how to do 
the actual upgrade as well as a brief description of how to deal with the 
changes.  /I'm/ looking forward to it, anyway. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman