Bug#584415: grub-common: grub-mkimage has gotten rid of its (supposedly sane) default

[Didier Raboud]

On Fri, 4 Jun 2010 13:46:59 +0100, Colin Watson <cjwatson at debian.org>
wrote:
> tags 584415 fixed-upstream
> thanks
> 
> On Thu, Jun 03, 2010 at 02:07:07PM +0200, Didier Raboud wrote:
>> Package: grub-common
>> Version: 1.98+20100527-2
>> Severity: important
>> 
>> Hi, 
>> 
>> while hunting down http://bugs.debian.org/584371 , it appears that from
>> version 1.98+20100527, grub-mkimage requires a -O, --format option to
be
>> set,
>> otherwise it throws an unclear "Target not specified".
>> 
>> IMHO there are two things:
>> 
>> i) the error message is misleading (_Target_ not specified, where the
>> --help
>> speaks about _format_)
> 
> I've made the message clearer upstream.
> 
> 2010-06-04  Colin Watson  <cjwatson at ubuntu.com>
> 
> 	* util/grub-mkimage.c: Make target-related error messages slightly
> 	more helpful; -O talks about "format".  Explicitly point to the use
> 	of -O if no target is specified.
> 	Reported by: Didier Raboud (Debian bug #584415).

Hi, 

thanks for that: that's exactly what I wanted. :->

>> ii) it used to use a (supposedly sane) default and now it requires -O
> 
> This was deliberate.  grub-mkimage is now common across platforms; this
> is a step on the road to making it easier for people to do things like
> generating EFI boot images on BIOS systems.  Since we now only ship one
> version of grub-mkimage in the grub-common package, it doesn't really
> have a sane default available to it any more.
> 
> It's regrettable that this required a change to win32-support, and sorry
> about that - but grub-mkimage is mostly not supposed to be called
> directly, with the exception of tools like win32-support that are
> necessarily poking around in GRUB's internals, so I think this interface
> change is worth it.
> 
> Thanks,

Well. I very much understand those reasons which I can only support:
that's great. I was just surprised by that unexpected win32-loader (and not
-support :-) ) FTBFS, which I could solve in reasonable time.

Thanks for your time and keep up the good job with grub !

Cheers, 

OdyX