Bug#574617: grub-common: GRUB_DEFAULT=saved not working

[Francois Gouget]

On Tue, 13 Apr 2010, Francois Gouget wrote:
[...]
> Apparently the reason is that save_default_entry() in 
> /usr/lib/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib expects GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true instead of 
> GRUB_DEFAULT=saved as the online grub documentation would seem to imply.

It turns out that one needs both GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true *and* 
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved, otherwise things just don't work. As far as I can 
tell this is totally undocumented:
 * GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT is not present in /etc/default/grub
 * GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT is not mentionned anywhere in /usr/share/doc/grub-*/*


I was about to submit a patch to remove GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT from 
/usr/lib/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib. However it seems adding it was supposed 
to fix a bug:

http://osdir.com/ml/grub-devel-gnu/2009-12/msg00276.html

However I must say I don't see what GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT was supposed to 
fix, only that it essentially broke things from my perspective.

Also I don't see why the 'save_default' call is added conditionnally to 
the menu entries. According to the message above the goal behind the 
introduction of savedefault was to not have to modify custom entries if 
the implementation changed. However now custom entries still need to be 
modified if one switches savedefault on/off. So I think savedefault 
should be called systematically and check itself whether to actually 
save something or not.

-- 
Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr>              http://fgouget.free.fr/
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