Bug#1012865: grub2: Re-enable discovery of other OSes by default (GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false)

[Samuel Henrique]

Source: grub2
X-Debbugs-Cc: samueloph at debian.org
Version: 2.06-1
Severity: normal

Hello,

Grub's upstream has changed its default behavior regarding discovery
of other OSes by disabling the feature (os-prober).

This has come to my attention when updating grub2 on testing today:
https://salsa.debian.org/grub-team/grub/-/blob/f844128767f947e18f86ba8a32d745f9d7a60b57/debian/NEWS#L1-L5

When briefly discussing this over IRC at debian-devel, I was pointed
at another brief discussion, which has a nice summary of the
reasonings behind it:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2021-December/041769.html

This is my request for us to not follow upstream's default, and stick
to discovering other OSes in the system, as it was the previous
behavior.

I'm worried that not doing so will lead to a lot of frustration for
our users, as this basically means shipping Debian without dual boot
support out of the box.
The users would need to 1st: know about this issue and 2nd: perform a
configuration change and grub update.

I understand we have the NEWS file in place to warn users upgrading
their systems, and also that grub will print a warning about it, but I
don't think this is good enough as it will catch a lot of users by
surprise.

I also don't think there's a worthy trade-off being made here
(security vs user experience), the Ubuntu mailing list does discuss
better alternatives which would require some more work, but with only
2 options in the table (OS discovery enabled or disabled), I prefer
enabled.

Regards,

-- 
Samuel Henrique <samueloph>