Re: Next release?

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 01:32 +0200, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:

> If a boot drive is the same as a root drive, you are right. Otherwise we need 
> to do so.
>
> I think we have seen tons of examples with GRUB Legacy which may not be solved 
> automatically in all cases. If one digs into the archive of bug-grub, I guess 
> several cases would be found easily. With GRUB 2, we can avoid embedding BIOS 
> drive numbers in many cases, using UUIDs or labels or files. But this does 
> not always work, so I am afraid that we need to support device.map, even if 
> it is an evil necessity.

That's a very advanced setup.  I actually cannot imagine why anyone
would use different boot and root drives.  Well, maybe the boot drive
has no partitions that GRUB or the host OS can access?  It's getting
less likely these days.  Or maybe the boot drive is too small for GRUB?
Anything bigger than a 360K floppy should be able to hold all GRUB
modules.  Or maybe the boot drive is too slow?  It's hard for me to
imagine a system that has hard drives but boots only from a floppy.

And let's not forget that dual drive installs are twice as prone to
failure.  Either drive failure makes the system unbootable.

Now, suppose that we still want to support dual drive installs.  We
should make sure is that it doesn't happen by accident.  Then it's a
fair game to ask the user for an extra option to enable a 
dual drive install, and that option could be the drive number.

Dual drive installs are also highly unportable, which means that UUIDs,
labels and file search should be sufficient in most cases.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin