Re: Next release?

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Saturday 19 July 2008 17:06:24 Robert Millan wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 01:32:18AM +0200, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> > On Wednesday 16 July 2008 01:21:57 Pavel Roskin wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 01:15 +0200, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> > > > OK. Then how do you install GRUB into (hd1) in a development machine,
> > > > which is (hd0) in a booting machine? When GRUB may not correctly
> > > > determine BIOS drives, do you want to just give up?
> > >
> > > The boot drive can be determined at boot.
> > >
> > > Granted, there are buggy BIOSes, but we handle it already.  All we need
> > > is to encode into the bootloader that it was installed on a hard drive
> > > (actually, not on a floppy, real or emulated), and the bootloader would
> > > use 0x80 rather than the value from BIOS.
> > >
> > > We don't need specific drive numbers like 0x81.  We need one bit of
> > > information, and we can figure it out at the install time.
> >
> > If a boot drive is the same as a root drive, you are right. Otherwise we
> > need to do so.
> >
> > I think we have seen tons of examples with GRUB Legacy which may not be
> > solved automatically in all cases. If one digs into the archive of
> > bug-grub, I guess several cases would be found easily. With GRUB 2, we
> > can avoid embedding BIOS drive numbers in many cases, using UUIDs or
> > labels or files. But this does not always work, so I am afraid that we
> > need to support device.map, even if it is an evil necessity.
>
> Which cases are there that can't be fixed by using UUIDs?

In any case where UUIDs are not used.

I am totally against ripping off device.map. Pavel's idea is too idealistic, 
and that regresses the flexibility.

Regards,
Okuji