[systemd-devel] implementation status of http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/ ?

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, 2013-06-04 at 15:30 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mon, 03.06.13 19:10, Colin Walters (walters at verbum.org) wrote:
> 
> > What's the implementation status of
> > http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/ ?
> > 
> > For example, do any patches exist for grub or syslinux to read
> > from /boot/loader (either at runtime or to generate a bootloader-native
> > config file statically?)
> > 
> > I'm aware gummiboot does (and its wiki page should probably crosslink
> > with the above).  But any others?
> 
> The Grub patch I did (that Kay linked exists), but this isn't polished
> and fully integrated into Fedora yet.

The question I had looking at this is: what determines the ordering?  I
guess it's intended to be the version field, but what if I have both
Debian and Fedora installed, the default comes down to whichever has a
newer kernel?

Or should bootloaders only use the version field to sort within say a
given machine-id, and retain their own custom config files for global
ordering?  That'd make the most sense to me.

BTW, there is quite a lot of semantics that comes with the phrase
"Debian-style version sorts".  gummiboot appears to use "strverscmp"
from glibc, but that doesn't do the "~" character for example.