Re: Configuration option to disable os-prober?

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 07:31:21PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 04:38:23PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Some people seem to want to disable os-prober for various reasons (e.g.
> > they have lots of test installations lying around that they don't
> > normally want to get in the way, or they don't want installations on
> > external drives to be included permanently in the boot menu, etc.). Now,
> > they can just remove the os-prober package, but that doesn't really
> > scale as other packages are allowed to depend on it too.
> > 
> > Perhaps we could have a configuration option for this? Patch attached.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm unfamiliar with os-prober.  What other purposes are there for installing
> it?  grub-mkconfig is the only one I can think of, so the situation you
> describe sounds very unlikely.  Could you ellaborate?

Well, I happen to know that our graphical installer depends on it :-),
and sometimes people install it for testing purposes (or it accidentally
remains installed). More generally though I'm not a fan of "remove this
package" as a configuration mechanism.

> I'm concerned about the number of options in grub-mkconfig in general.  It
> has a tendency to grow a lot, and unfortunately they're not documented.

Maybe that's amenable to being addressed in itself - perhaps a manual
page? (info is fine for complete manuals for large systems but not
really great for quick-reference kind of things.)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden