Bug#768329: grub-common: Please enable splash for jessie

[Christian Hofstaedtler]

* Colin Watson <cjwatson at debian.org> [141106 16:32]:
> In principle this makes sense; I'm just a bit nervous about this at this
> point, and changing this will cause a ucf prompt for large numbers of
> people, so I want to get it right first time.  CCing debian-devel; does
> anyone know of reasons why adding "splash" to the default command line
> would be a bad thing?

To give some context for debian-devel:

Nothing in a default install currently Depends or Recommends
plymouth, so don't worry about getting a graphical splash screen or
anything. Anyway, if you were to install plymouth, the default
"theme" is *text*.


Why does one need plymouth in the first place?

Plymouth is a terminal multiplexer. Without it, if, f.e., there is
prompting for an encrypted disk passphrase, you'll end up with other
messages writing over the password prompt and so on. [1] With plymouth
installed you'll get a nice standalone prompt for the passphrase.
I imagine this being the same for systemd and upstart and any other
event-based inits.
http://web.dodds.net/~vorlon/wiki/blog/Plymouth_is_not_a_bootsplash/
has some additional background.


Why's there a new boot parameter?

I don't know, but currently at least Ubuntu, Tanglu (both via
grub-common), and Fedora do it this way.
It's certainly nice to have the parameter so the recovery boot
option can skip plymouth (esp. if you were to enable a graphical
theme).


[1] How a passphrase prompt currently looks like:
    https://i.imgur.com/DORkOKa.jpg

-- 
 ,''`.  Christian Hofstaedtler <zeha at debian.org>
: :' :  Debian Developer
`. `'   7D1A CFFA D9E0 806C 9C4C  D392 5C13 D6DB 9305 2E03
  `-

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