Re: [PATCH] Re: grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda1 fails

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

On Fri, 2009-06-12 at 12:28 +0200, Felix Zielcke wrote:

> Ok here's a new one which compiles without warnings.

I suggest that whenever a patch is published, it comes with a detailed
description.  Surely, it could be gathered by rereading the thread, but
I think it's not sufficient for two reasons.

The first reason is that we want the patches reviewed by more people.
Not everybody has time to read the whole discussion.

The second reason is that the description the shows how the author sees
the changes, what the potential benefits are, what code is affected.
The reviewers would be able to compare the goals to the implementation.

Even if the description was already published, it should not be hard to
publish it again, perhaps with some improvements.

Regarding this patch, I don't think we need to add a function to
hostdisk.c is it's only used in grub-setup.c.  It would be better to
have it in grub-setup.c unless it's a generic function or there is a
good chance that it will be used elsewhere.

grub_make_system_path_relative_to_its_root is a very long name.  There
is nothing wrong with a long name per se, but it may be in sign that the
function is too specialized and should not be in hostdisk.c.

Following is not good for several reasons:

#warning "The function `grub_make_system_path_relative_to_its_root'
might not work on your OS correctly."

The warning will only be seen by those who compile GRUB, but not by the
end users who installed a binary.  The warning doesn't explain what
exactly may not work correctly.  Since we are talking about new
functionality here, I'd rather omit an unsafe implementation if
realpath() is not available.

What is free_ptr?  It looks like it's a pointer that the caller should
free.  I think functions should be self-contained and should not ask the
caller to do the cleanup (unless they actually return something useful
in the allocated memory).

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin