Thu 12 Aug 2010 04:31:20 PM UTC, original submission:
Operating systems that include GRUB can not conform fully to the sprit of grub.
I beleive that the operating system /distrobutions adopting grub should detect grub and then register itself and conform to a standard to incorporate it's configuration rather than take over the configuration of grub which should be up to the user or administrator of the system.
At least one major distribution that has adopted grub2 early stores pre-configuration files in it's own settings folder and notes that the grub.cfg file is not to be directly modified by users.
This seems to me to be backward but necessary. I believe it is because the faculties and a common method for solving some basic installation and boot problems are not provided by grub and are left to the operating systems adopting it. This limits it's independence and usefulness to people that wish to use it to actually create a multiboot system.
The problems are actually few and solvable in an open way. A boot loader must exist for an operating system and it must be able to update the bootloader when it's kernel changes. It must also make some effort to leave all other installed operating systems bootable.
To accomplish this I propose modules for commands that allow users to manage the configuration file within grub itself and prehaps even to upgrade grub.
Source code for an executable that can load and use the configuration and upgrade modules would allow adopting operating systems to reproduce exactly the standard configuration management within their own contexts allowing operating systems to register themselves and updates in a standardized, open and independent way.
Additional features that might attract adoption of a standard open configuration and registration method would be to allow for multilevel menus and the incorporation of branding after OS selection without clobbering the user's top level personalization.
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