Announcing GRUB 1.97.2

Announcing GRUB 1.97.2

[Robert Millan]

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Hi,

GNU GRUB version 1.97.2 has been released.

GRUB, also known as the GRand Unified Bootloader, is a modular, portable
bootloader that supports a number of platforms, including standard BIOS-based
PCs, IEEE-1275 platforms (such as the OLPC and some PowerPC/Sparc64 hardware)
and coreboot, the free (as in freedom) pre-boot initialization framework.

  <http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/>

This is a bug-fix release for a number of problems (excerpt from NEWS file
is attached) that were found after GRUB 1.97.1 was released.

Most importantly, it fixes two problems with header files of BSD origin:

  - A number of header declarations had their copyright/license headers
    missing.  They had been imported in GRUB Legacy many years ago, and
    recently found their way into the 1.97 release.  Vladimir Serbinenko
    spotted this problem and fixed it by tracking down the header origin
    and adding the missing copyright and license.

  - In one of those cases (the bootinfo structure, used for booting the kernel
    of FreeBSD), the original license was the unrevised BSD license with
    advertisement clause [*], which made it impossible for 3rd parties to
    comply with GPL requirements and legally distribute GRUB.  Again,
    Vladimir fixed this by rewriting the bootinfo struct declaration.

[*] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

We apologize for the inconvenience; the GRUB project is very strict with
license verification, even more with GRUB 2 than with GRUB Legacy, but in
this case the problem was introduced very early in GRUB Legacy history.

To the best of our knowledge, all issues are resolved now, but if you were to
find any other problem, please don't hesitate to contact grub-devel or mail
me directly about it.

A source tarball for the new release can be found at:

  http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.97.2.tar.gz

and its GPG detached signature [*]:

  http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.97.2.tar.gz.sig

[*] You can use either of the above signature file to verify that
the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact.  First,
be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball.
Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify grub-1.97.2.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys DEA2C38E

and rerun the `gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.61
  Ruby 1.8.7

GCC 4.4 is the recommended version for building it, although any version
starting with 4.1.3 is supported in this release.

-- 
Robert Millan

  "Be the change you want to see in the world" -- Gandhi

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New in 1.97.2:

* Fix a few 4 GiB limits.

* Fix license problems with a few BSD headers.

* Lots of misc bugfixes.

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Re: Announcing GRUB 1.97.2

[Robert Millan]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 07:36:51PM +0100, Robert Millan wrote:
>   - A number of header declarations had their copyright/license headers
>     missing.  They had been imported in GRUB Legacy many years ago, and
>     recently found their way into the 1.97 release.

The files in question were imported by Bean in early 2008.  He apparently
relied on the existing license header being correct and replaced it with
GPLv3 one.  It's not his fault that it wasn't, but he should have notified it.

Please remember to always check with the maintainers [1] before importing code
from GRUB Legacy (or any other source).

[1] Well, that'd be with me, since Pavel resigned and Marco and Okuji are not
    active anymore...

-- 
Robert Millan

  "Be the change you want to see in the world" -- Gandhi