update-grub

[Jason Thomas]

Hi All,

I feel update-grub has become a real mess, as people think up things it
just keeps getting added. The program wasn't very well written from the
start.

It would be possible to clean up the current version of update-grub,
but, I think we can do better.


There are a few things I'd like to change:

1) move grub configuration to /etc/grub/

Having the configuration option in menu.lst is just confusing, people do
stuff like uncomment them when there not really part of menu.lst.

Configuration should be done in etc anyway.


2) implement a template based systems

This is just something that I've been playing with I think it allows for
greater flexibility in what update-grub can do.

Currently what I've allowed for is plain text templates, and executable
templates. Which means you can have static content included into your
menu.lst or write a script to generate content for your menu.lst.

I think this is pretty neat.

We could also consider doing what apache2 does and thats use symlinks to
turn these on and off.

So you have a dir.d with available text/scripts and symlink them into
pre.d, kernel.d and post.d

3) configure grub from debconf

The new version of update-grub that I have written does not magically
figure out for you where your root directory is.

I propose that this be done through debconf when the package is
installed or reconfigured.

What this means is that the auto detection code we have now would be
moved into the postinst scripts. Where we would make the appropriate
suggestion to the user, and prompt for input. Which gives them the
oportunity to override our assumption.



Okay then, I've already written something that seems to work. But I
wrote it along time ago and so is probably missing some of the features
of the current update-grub, if you want to check it out see link below.


Thanks.

http://users.airpoint.com.au/~jason/update-grub.tar.gz