Re: [RFC] grub-install C rewrite

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

On 26.09.2013 19:10, Seth Goldberg wrote:
> 
>  Ditto here.  I'd prefer it stay *sh.
> 
Even if it would mean to go with bash?
Solaris was one of the worst platforms for making grub-install work
there due to its very limited shell and standard tools behaving
differently. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it got broken for
solaris again.
I see Solaris as one of platforms which can benefit a lot from this move.
>  --S
> 
> On Sep 26, 2013, at 6:35 AM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 03:08:54PM +0200, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' 
>> Serbinenko wrote:
>>> Hello, all. Recently I made some order in hostdisk.c and getroot.c
>>> involving splitting in OS-specific parts.
>>> In the same time I added WinAPI version of getroot/hostdisk allowing
>>> grub-probe to work on windows natively
>>> Also on-going is AROS-specific parts.
>>> Windows and AROS are not friendly with bash.
>>> The attempt to make both multiple files of same type work and handling
>>> whitespaces/newlines/... in filenames would result in very ugly code
>>> with loads of evals.
>>> Current code may have subtle assumptions on behaviour of common tools
>>> like sed and on locale (E.g. "[a-z]" doesn't cover u if locale is Estonian).
>>> So to check viability I rewrote grub-install in C. This is mostly proof
>>> of concept with loads of FIXMEs but I could boot i386-pc install made
>>> with it. In many aspects (static variables, some tests, general
>>> structure) it's reminiscent of sh version of grub-install it's based on.
>>> Some functionality is likely to stay OS-specific, e.g. executing
>>> compressors or determining firmware.
>>>
>>> I'd like to know the opinion of other people on possible switchover. If
>>> switched then it'll have to be all grub-install, grub-mkrescue,
>>> grub-mknetdir and grub-mkstandalone.
>>> I'd like to hear from other people.
>>
>> Given the number of times I have had to edit grub-install in the past to
>> get it to work right on a powerpc machine (I think it is now working OK),
>> I would hate to have had that be C code.  After all it really is mainly
>> a wrapper around other grub tools.
>>
>> I think windows not having bash is a rather low priority to most people
>> compared to actually be able to work with grub on the platforms where
>> it is pretty much the only choice.
>>
>> So personally, based on my experience, I hate this idea.
>>
>> -- 
>> Len Sorensen
>>
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> 
> 
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