on copying and searching of unicode.pf2

[Pascal Hambourg]

(debian-boot is the Debian installer mailing list, so redirecting this 
discussion to grub package maintainers' mailing list)

On 02/02/2026 at 20:48, Volodymyr Mutel wrote:
> 
> So, in postinst script, unicode.pf2 is copied into /boot/grub/ , 
> supposedly to improve its accessibility chances.
> While in grub-mkconfig it is searched and found as its original under / 
> usr/share/grub/ if not set explicitly as GRUB_FONT= in /etc/default/grub .

You should also mention that the postinst script runs grub-install which 
copies unicode.pf2 into /boot/grub/fonts/, where 'loadfont unicode' will 
look for it.

> I just tried to set up a Debian Trixie instance with /boot on vfat 
> volume and / (root fs) on a loop image residing on the same vfat volume,
> and I got this in /boot/grub/grub.cfg :
(...)
> set root=(loop0)
>      font="/usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2"
> fi

Note that this stanza is the other alternative of

if [ x$feature_default_font_path = xy ] ; then
    font=unicode
else

The test is true ($feature_default_font_path = y), so $font = unicode 
and the font is loaded from /boot/grub/fonts/unicode.pf2 installed by 
grub-install.

(Actually, when booting with a monolithic signed GRUB image, which is 
the default, the font is loaded from an embedded file 
(memdisk)/fonts/unicode.pf2, because loading a font file from outside of 
the image is prohibited if secure boot is enabled)

> So, my question is, were there any ideas and proposals to align the 
> intentions of postinst script with the logic of 00_header ?

My first idea would be that postinst stops copying the font into 
/boot/grub/ which seems to be useless.

My second idea would be that grub.cfg should not rely on anything 
outside the filesystem containing /boot, so anything else GRUB needs at 
boot time should be copied into /boot/grub. This is already done with 
the background picture when its original location is not readable by GRUB.