playing nice with other OSs

[Federico Beffa]

Hi,

I'm looking into the possibility of installing GuixSD in parallel with
another operating system on a single machine (dual boot).  Looking
into the code (gnu system grub) I see that the GRUB "linux" and
"initrd" commands are hardwired into the code.  This appears to make
the definition of a <menu-entry> for another operating system
(GNU/Hurd, NetBSD, Windows, ...) impossible.  Am I right, or am I
overlooking something?

If the above is correct and we want to make GuixSD play nicely with
others, then I suppose that we will have to modify the <menu-entry>
record.  I see two possibilities:

* We could try to generalize the fields along the lines of linux ->
kernel, initrd -> kernel-boot-helpers, ...

* Define operating system specific records such as <linux-menu-entry>,
<hurd-menu-entry>, <chainloader-menu-entry>, ..., where the content of
the fields for the systems not handled by GuixSD would come from the
user operating-system file configuration.

I personally prefer the second approach. What do you think?

Regards,
Fede