Bug#1127592: Possible regression: GRUB_DISABLE_EDITING ignored on Debian 13 (grub2)

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 09:52:41AM +0000, Mate Kukri wrote:
>Can you clarify:
>1. which documentation exactly refers to "GRUB_DISABLE_EDITING"?
>2. which debian / grub2 package version "GRUB_DISABLE_EDITING" is
>known to work on?

I tried two different search engines and found exactly one reference to 
that term anywhere on the internet (which is highly unusual in itself!).  
I'm going to break the link slightly because I don't want to give it 
more references, but you can remove the "XXX" strings from it if you 
want to look:

   httpsXXX://www.thelinuxvaultXXX.net/linux-security-hardening/how-to-use-XXXgrub-security-to-harden-your-linux-boot/

The term GRUB_DISABLE_EDITING appears nowhere in GRUB's git history, 
neither upstream nor in Debian.  I cannot find the term in any upstream 
or Debian documentation.  The way that the GRUB documentation documents 
to disable menu editing is to set a password, as described here:

   https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/Menu-interface.html
   https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/Authentication-and-authorisation.html

I conclude that either the "GRUB_DISABLE_EDITING" option was introduced 
by some other distribution, or (much more likely) it is a fiction made 
up by a large language model (LLM or "AI").  The web page on 
thelinuxvault.net above has other structural features that suggest to me 
that it was written by an LLM.  It may happen to include things that are 
true, probably due to copying from other sources, but in general you 
shouldn't trust anything it says.

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson at debian.org]