Re: grub-0.5.96.1 notes and 'b' vs <Enter> inconsistency

[Jochen Hoenicke]

On Apr 15, Jay Wardle wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 1.  I had trouble compiling GRUB on both of my Debian
> systems. Initially, neither had libncurses5-dev installed,
> but both did have libncurses5 installed (required as
> part of base system).
> configure had trouble realizing libncurses was there,
> perhaps libncurses wasn't working right somehow....
> Everything worked just fine after I installed the header
> files with the libncurses5-dev package.

That is the purpose of the -dev package.  It contains the header files
that are needed to compile a ncurses application such as grub.

> 2. It is a little confusing and seems inconsistent that
> 'b' boots when editing entries, but <Enter> boots when
> in the menu.

I don't see how to do it better.  In the main menu booting should be
possible with <Enter> as this is just what I would expect.  When
editing entries pressing <Enter> to boot would be IMHO counter
intuitive as you have only one of the commands selected and booting
executes all of them.

> 3. A common boot manager feature is the ability to save
> the previous MBR/boot program before or during installation.
> Some even allow it to be restored later.
>
> One common use of GRUB is to add lots of functionality
> to an MSDOS formatted floppy.  It would be nice if
> the MSDOS MBR could be saved to a file (bootsect.dos is
> named in the sample menu.lst) that could be be used to boot
> the floppy into MSDOS. I wanted that capability and had to
> learn how to use dd to save the boot sector.  It would be
> much nicer (and more Unified) if GRUB could do that for me.

The problem with this option is, that it requires write support for
the file systems.  Currently file-system support is read-only and grub
can only write to special locations as the boot sector or the MBR.

Adding write support is not only difficult and makes grub much bigger.
It is also dangerous, as bugs may easily lead to corrupt disks.  At
the moment there are only three locations where grub writes to disk
and its much easier to get these places bug-free.

  Jochen