Bug#393079: update-grub: savedefault can cause problems

[Robert Millan]

On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 06:08:03PM -0300, Peter Cordes wrote:
> 
>  So I don't know where grub could save defaults to, and I'm not shocked that
> savedefault doesn't work.  I've always been suspicious about by default
> writing to the hard drive while booting, but this is the first time
> savedefault has ever actually caused a problem.  My opinion is that it's not
> such a great default.  The standard grub menu.lst doesn't use the saved
> default anyway.  I would suggest making savedefault another
> automagic-comment configurable item, defaulting to off.

Yes indeed, savedefault is implemented by writing into MBR.  Unfortunately, we
had to diverge from upstream on this, and it resulted into a handful of problems
I'd rather not get into.  Given that it's not enabled by default, though, I
think it's safe to do another release with it.

For etch+1 this will all be taken over by GRUB 2.

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Robert Millan

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