Bug#736678: grub2: support init boot flag selection

[Axel Beckert]

Hi Colin,

Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 07:36:05PM -0500, Michael Gilbert wrote:
> > I've been working on a system that allows the user to easily make
> > their own init system selection:
> > http://packages.qa.debian.org/i/init-select.html
> > 
> > I've just finished working on a patch for grub (see attached) to
> > support init-select's /etc/default/init conffile.
> > 
> > This changes util/grub.d/10_linux.in to put the selected init bootflag
> > in GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT.  If there is a better approach, please
> > let me know, and I'll try to improve the patch.

As already mentioned to Michael in another bug report, I initially
expected his package init-select to be a pure grub2 config
implementation.

> However, I don't think this should require changing grub2 at all.
> Nowadays we support other packages dropping files into
> /etc/default/grub.d/*.cfg, which are read after /etc/default/grub and
> can modify the various variables that are exported by grub-mkconfig to
> /etc/grub.d/ scripts.  Could you investigate taking this approach in
> init-select instead?  In this case, I think that would be better than
> adding another entry to grub2's already large and unwieldy patch stack.

My idea was to modify 10_linux (preferably upstream) to iterate over
all installed init systems, i.e. list each combination of kernel and
init system in the menu. This would obsolete Michael's init-select in
some way, but I suspect he wouldn't be mad about it. :-)

I'm though quite sure this variant can't be implemented externally as
it needs to add a loop inside 10_linux.

And yes, I know that would boost the length of the kernel list in
grub. Which is perfectly fine for me (c.f. #690538 ;-).

I may come up with a patch for that in the future if I get it once
working.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
`. `'   |  1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486  202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE
  `-    |  4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329  6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5