GRUB2 – should we use a recent snapshot?

[Jacek Konieczny]

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?

Greets,
    Jacek