Re: Next release?

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

On Thu, 2008-07-24 at 19:02 +0200, Marco Gerards wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Now that we have lzma compression, we should probably consider making
> > another release in a week or two.
> >
> > Before it happens, I'd like to add a configure test for working target
> > compiler, so that users of pure x86_64 machines are not surprised by a
> > message that "start" and "_start" are not found.

Done.

> > By the way, that check could be generalized to allow more symbols, such
> > as "Ltext0" on Cygwin.  It would be great if GRUB 1.97 compiled on
> > Cygwin out-of-box.  Cygwin lacked some lzo development files, but we
> > don't need them anymore.

I was wrong here, but the progress is being made.  I'm just not sure it
should be in 1.97.

> > All warnings for i386-pc have been fixed, but perhaps I'll look at other
> > targets if I have time.  Also, Valgrind finds some memory leaks, that we
> > may want to fix now.

The absolute majority of warnings have been fixed, including all for
i386-pc.  There are some hard warnings for other architectures.  The can
be suppressed, but they indicate that we need e.g. some reorganization
of the include files.  So it's better to keep them for now.

I was unable to check sparc64-ieee1275.  I'm afraid it's broken.  I
don't have hardware to test it on, but the real problem is lack of time.
But with x86_64-efi, I guess most issues with 64-bit bootloaders have
been resolved.

> Did all this happen?  Is NEWS and distlist and whatever is required
> for a release up-to-date?  In that case, Okuji, do you object to a
> release?
> 
> Bean suggested we release before we continue with his ideas regarding
> the modularity of the code.  Okuji (and others), can you please review
> the patch I sent in for handlers in the thread related to the
> elimination of normal mode?

We need at least a simple fix for cross-drive installs.  Perhaps we need
a PC specific function to translate device names like hd1 into BIOS IDs
like 0x81.

Also it would be nice to make grub-install ask users to check only
relevant entries from device map.  By showing the whole file, the risk
is that everybody would just ignore the message.  I think grub-setup
should have a "semi-verbose" mode, in which it would print something
like:

device.map: /dev/sda is (hd0)

And then grub-setup would ask the user to verify those assumptions.

We can make a more fundamental fix later, unless it's already
implemented, tested and meets no objections.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin