Re: ping (update-grub2)

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Monday 27 November 2006 18:00, Robert Millan wrote:
> No comments?  Are you interested in getting this into the main grub tree?
> In my opinion, since update-grub needs a rewrite it's a good oportunity to
> merge this now and unify grub.cfg generation across distributions
> (something that wasn't possible with the old update-grub because of
> copyright issues).
>
> That said, if you don't like the idea then we could proceed adding it in
> debian, but that might close the door to merging in the future (maintaining
> the script in debian ourselves implies accepting contributions from many
> people without any paperwork arrangements).

I describe my own opinion. If others do not agree, let me know.

If the script is generic enough, and other projects are willing to use it, it 
is convenient to put it in official versions ("official" means "upstream" in 
Debian, but I don't like the term "upstream" very much, BTW). So, in this 
case, I accept it. But if it is used only for Debian, I don't think it is 
worth doing.

I know it is not so nice to put distribution-specific scripts in official 
versions with my past experience, because official versions are not always 
synchronized with distribution versions, so when a script in an official 
version is "outdated" for a distribution, it is necessary to locally patch 
the script, and this effort can be quite painful, if you always need to make 
patches for every version.

That's why we don't have the directory "debian" any longer. We had it in GRUB 
legacy in version 0.5.92 or something when Gordon was the maintainer of the 
GRUB package in Debian. But this became really annoying after Gordon got 
inactive, because I had no idea on how to maintain it, as I was not a Debian 
user then. And, someone (I think he was Jason Thomas) complained, and I 
decided to drop it from the official version.

Okuji