Re: device syntax

[Tomas Ebenlendr]

> I prefer consistency among various architectures. Note that PC BIOS does 
> not offer any name for drives. They are represented by numbers. "hd" 
> and "fd" are aliases for numbers.
> 
> If we assume that the user knows her firmware very well, we don't need 
> to provide "hd" or "fd", since the user should be able to specify 
> numbers. Actually, specifying drives by numbers is supported by GRUB 
> legacy, but nobody uses it, simply because it is not intuitive.
> 
> IMO, we should not assume that the user knows technical details. If we 
> write an installer for Open Firmware-based machines, the user may not 
> know anything about Open Firmware. The best thing for the user is that 
> the user does not have to learn many things. If we provide a consistent 
> interface, the user needs to study the single thing. Nothing else.
> 
> I think the important goal for GRUB is to provide an easy way for 
> ordinary users and a complicated but still useful features for experts. 
> So I propose always using simple aliases for drives. If you want to use 
> a device name provided by your firmware explicitly, you could use this 
> kind of syntax:
> 
> devalias foo "/address@hidden/address@hidden/address@hidden/address@hidden,0"
> multiboot (foo,0)/boot/kernel
> 
> EFI uses more horrible device names. This is quoted from EFI How To 
> Guide:
> 
> Acpi(PNP0A03,1)/PCI(0|0)/Scsi(Pun0,Lun0)/HD(Part1,Sig1B16CC00-ABD0-0)
> 
> If we use escape chacters, it becomes too unreadable.
> 
> Okuji

Hmm, and what if there are quotes, or newlines in name? I think that we
should be able to pass /any/ string to bios/firmware. Question is what
characters we want to escape. If escaped characters will be e.g. quotes,
the need of using this will be very little. If we escape commas, many
names will get horrible. So what about this solution, extended by '\' as
escaping character, using \" for char '"', \\ for '\' and \xxx for
nonprintable or other characters?

-- 
                                 Tomas 'ebi' Ebenlendr
                                 http://get.to/ebik
                                 PF 2004.80479988869