Bug#736678: grub2: support init boot flag selection

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 02:54:28PM +0100, Axel Beckert wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > 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.

Personally I would think that would be a pretty cumbersome thing to
present in the boot menu.  I think I prefer Michael's approach of
selecting this in userspace for the next boot; you can always edit the
boot entry and add init= if something goes wrong.  We don't have to
present *every* possibility in the boot menu, and given poor support for
combinatorial explosion it's probably better if we don't try.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]