Re: Support for howmany option in grub2

[Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko <phcoder@gmail.com>]

Robert Millan wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 08:04:51PM +0200, jezz@hkfree.org wrote:
>   
>> Hello,
>> I am using Debian GNU/Linux as my primary system. As a loader I am using GRUB.
>> Actually I have upgraded to GRUB2. I don't know, if it was feature of original
>> (legacy) GRUB or it was functionality provided by debian scripts (update-grub),
>> for generating menu.lst. There was feature - howmany. This option specifies
>> number of kernels, that user wants to have in boot menu. Script, that modifies
>> menu.lst, use this variable. I like this feature, because I have usually more
>> kernels, but I want to see only last two versions in GRUB menu. I have created
>> patch, that add support for this to /etc/grub.d/10_linux. I have created this
>> patch against version shipped with Debian (1.97~beta3-1) - I don't know if
>> there are some Debian specific modifications. Also there should be variable
>> GRUB_HOW_MANY propagated from /etc/default/grub (my patch don't do
>> this).
>> Kernel and it's rescue variant is counted as one kernel.
>>
>> I have already reported this bug to Debian BTS:
>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=548600
>>     
>
> Does anyone else think we want an option for this?  It seems like "feature
> creep".
>
>   
Many kernels encumber view and may make menu difficult to navigate (I
have to scroll through a lot of linux kernels before I get to FreeBSD).
But choosing kernels would involve heuristics which are likely to fail
if e.g. user is in the middle of git bisect
But the core issue is a bad menu organisation. I think we need two-level
menu. It seems Bean is already working on issue but I haven't followed
that thread closely

-- Regards Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko Personal git repository:
http://repo.or.cz/w/grub2/phcoder.git