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Re: [ITP] VOTE: grub 1.96-1 [experimental]


Charles Wilson wrote:
Christian Franke wrote:
I would like to contribute my Cygwin port of the boot manager GRUB2.
(http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-2.en.html)


Is anybody else as confused as I am? How in the world can you have a *boot manager* ported to cygwin? Cygwin requires the host Windows OS to be up and running; it has nothing to do with pre-OS bootloader operations...



Yes, it would not make much sense to port the source for the native binaries of some boot manager to Cygwin (except to provide another build platform).


But the GRUB2 package does contain more than these binaries (kernel.img + 76 .mod files). It provides several support tools to install (grub-install), try boot menu and shell (grub-emu), check native filesystem access (grub-fstest) or build rescue boot cdrom/floppy images (grub-mkrescue).

All these tools require some booted OS.


Unless I'm really missing something here, I don't think this is an appropriate candidate for the cygwin distro -- but I'm open to persuasion if somebody can kindly explain how cygwin-grub2 could POSSIBLY be of any use at all...

If GRUB2 is used and Windows is the main work OS, it is IMO useful to maintain the boot manger from Cygwin. If GRUB2 is not used as boot manger, the tools in the package can still be used to create rescue disks, tryout the boot shell or even access files in partitions with non-Windows filesystem.


Christian


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