GRUB2 – should we use a recent snapshot?

[Jan Rękorajski]

On Tue, 31 Dec 2013, Jacek Konieczny wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> The grub 2.00 release is buggy and lacking features. And their release
> cycle is ridiculous – 2.00 was released in June 2012, lots of fixes were
> commited to their repository, but no new release was made.
> 
> We have some patches from Fedora. I have been trying to fix bugs by
> back-porting patches from upstream, but the package in th is still
> unreliable (checked with pld-new-rescue, which relies heavily on GRUB).
> 
> Back-porting changes from upstream is less and less convenient, as
> differences between their trunk and 2.00 are now very big.
> 
> Fedora now has over 480 patches in their grub 2.00 package (some are
> upstream fixes, some are their own inventions) – I don't think we want
> to import and maintain all of them (not even knowing what they really
> fix and what is their impact). Cherry-picking Fedora patches would be
> probably even more difficult than back-porting fixes from upstream.
> 
> Instead I took a recent snapshot from GRUB2 repository and created a
> 'DEVEL' branch for our grub2 package. I have updated only the few
> missing patches that I thought they are usefull and dropped all the rest
> (including some PXE booting improvements from Fedora). Now the grub2
> package from the DEVEL branch works significantly better for me – PLD NR
> can now quite reliably boot via PBX (both BIOS and EFI).
> 
> I think we should switch to GRUB2 snapshot in Th.
> 
> What do you think?
> Does anybody need the patches I have dropped on the DEVEL branch?
> Can any grub2 user test the package from the DEVEL branch?

Tested on laptop and workstation, works fine after fixing sysconfig/grub.
I'd say go and merge to master.

-- 
Jan Rękorajski                                 | PLD/Linux
SysAdm                                         | http://www.pld-linux.org/
baggins<at>mimuw.edu.pl
baggins<at>pld-linux.org