Re: About firmware facilities

[Brendan Trotter]

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Colin Watson <address@hidden> wrote:
> I don't have relevant experience regarding multiboot in general, but ...
>
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 08:53:12AM +0930, Brendan Trotter wrote:
>> The same would apply to internationalization - GRUB should tell the OS
>> which language/locale it used, so that the OS can automatically use
>> the same language as a default (especially for OS installation CDs).
>
> Speaking as an OS installer developer, I'd actively prefer GRUB not to
> try to do this via specialised methods like multiboot. I don't want to
> have to maintain language lists and what-have-you in yet another place,
> cope with all the usual slight variations (e.g. things like pt_BR, or
> God-help-us something like the hopelessly inadequate language list in
> the USB keyboard specification), and cope with the fact that there are
> still more boot loaders out there than just GRUB and so some other
> mechanism needs to be maintained anyway.

An OS could choose to use the information provided by GRUB, or choose
to ignore the information provided by GRUB.

Assuming GRUB implements something that isn't hopelessly inadequate,
I'd prefer to attempt to use the information provided by GRUB (and
then have a fall-back). However, I may be a little unusual, in that
I'm willing to do a lot of extra work to avoid a little unnecessary
end-user configuration.

With this in mind, as an OS installer developer, what form of language
identifier would you consider the 'least hopelessly inadequate"? What
if GRUB used the exact same language identifiers that (for e.g.)
Ubuntu already uses?



Cheers,

Brendan