Re: Next release?

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

On Sat, 2008-07-19 at 22:16 +0200, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:

> I am totally against ripping off device.map. Pavel's idea is too
> idealistic, 
> and that regresses the flexibility.

Actually, it could be said that having device.map regresses flexibility.
Suppose I want to install GRUB on a flash drive that is seen
as /dev/sdb.  I need to add /dev/sdb to device.map even though I'm not
going to see that flash drive again.  I also need to check the options
to ensure that everything is installed on the flash drive and nothing is
installed elsewhere.

Suppose that we don't have device.map.  Then I don't need to add entries
for temporary devices.  Also, I won't be able to create a cross-drive
configuration by accident, simple because it won't be allowed by
default.

If you think that device.map is beneficial for cross-device installs,
then we can have an option to enable cross-device installs, that would
also enable device.map.  Single-drive installs don't need to make any
assumptions about the BIOS numbers, and thus won't use device.map in any
way.

Actually, I think that even cross-device installs should rely on probing
the relevant drives rather than on cached information.  But we can
discuss and implement it separately.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin