Re: About firmware facilities

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com>]

I don't have relevant experience regarding multiboot in general, but ...

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 08:53:12AM +0930, Brendan Trotter wrote:
> The same would apply to internationalization - GRUB should tell the OS
> which language/locale it used, so that the OS can automatically use
> the same language as a default (especially for OS installation CDs).

Speaking as an OS installer developer, I'd actively prefer GRUB not to
try to do this via specialised methods like multiboot. I don't want to
have to maintain language lists and what-have-you in yet another place,
cope with all the usual slight variations (e.g. things like pt_BR, or
God-help-us something like the hopelessly inadequate language list in
the USB keyboard specification), and cope with the fact that there are
still more boot loaders out there than just GRUB and so some other
mechanism needs to be maintained anyway.

Any OS installer that can take advantage of this kind of thing almost
certainly already has facilities to simply pass the appropriate locale
code as a boot parameter. GRUB should just use that. That means it's
accessible to the scripting interface, and so any necessary fixups will
be much easier to understand and maintain.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]