Re: GRUB portability

[Yoshinori Okuji]

 --- Marco Gerards <address@hidden> wrote:
> Robert just told me (on IRC) that PUPA doesn't have multiboot support.
> PUPA also lacks some other stuff, ext2fs support for example.

That's right. It is far from real use.

> If someone wants to work on PUPA, can he just copy copy from GRUB?  I
> assume PUPA should not be a complete rewrite... :)

No. If it were so easy, PUPA wouldn't be born.

There is no magic in this world. So if you want portable code, you need to
write portable code. No way to convert non-portable code into portable code
automatically.

But, the basic structure of PUPA is more or less similar to that of GRUB. So
you wouldn't have to write code from scratch in most cases. In fact, I used
fsys_fat.c in GRUB to add FAT support into PUPA. The modification was not very
small, though.

Personally, I think it is relatively easy to write code for PUPA, because PUPA
has dynamic memory management unlike GRUB.

Anyway, PUPA already has basic features (for programmers), so adding new
features is straightforward, once you understand the underlying concepts and
support functions.

Okuji