Re: Support for howmany option in grub2

[Michal Suchanek]

2009/10/3 Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko <address@hidden>:
> Robert Millan wrote:
>> On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 08:04:51PM +0200, address@hidden wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>> I am using Debian GNU/Linux as my primary system. As a loader I am using 
>>> GRUB.
>>> Actually I have upgraded to GRUB2. I don't know, if it was feature of 
>>> original
>>> (legacy) GRUB or it was functionality provided by debian scripts 
>>> (update-grub),
>>> for generating menu.lst. There was feature - howmany. This option specifies
>>> number of kernels, that user wants to have in boot menu. Script, that 
>>> modifies
>>> menu.lst, use this variable. I like this feature, because I have usually 
>>> more
>>> kernels, but I want to see only last two versions in GRUB menu. I have 
>>> created
>>> patch, that add support for this to /etc/grub.d/10_linux. I have created 
>>> this
>>> patch against version shipped with Debian (1.97~beta3-1) - I don't know if
>>> there are some Debian specific modifications. Also there should be variable
>>> GRUB_HOW_MANY propagated from /etc/default/grub (my patch don't do
>>> this).
>>> Kernel and it's rescue variant is counted as one kernel.
>>>
>>> I have already reported this bug to Debian BTS:
>>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=548600
>>>
>>
>> Does anyone else think we want an option for this?  It seems like "feature
>> creep".
>>
>>
> Many kernels encumber view and may make menu difficult to navigate (I
> have to scroll through a lot of linux kernels before I get to FreeBSD).
> But choosing kernels would involve heuristics which are likely to fail
> if e.g. user is in the middle of git bisect
> But the core issue is a bad menu organisation. I think we need two-level
> menu. It seems Bean is already working on issue but I haven't followed
> that thread closely
>

I guess it should be possible one way or another once the new menu
system is ready.

It should be possible to sort the non-linux extra boot options into a
separate list and thus make them easier to reach, for example.

Thanks

Michal