On 09/04/2014 04:50 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
On Mon, 2014-09-01 at 21:46 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
I think the language you have is functional, it just needs a delimiter
establishing our purview. Although, I'd suggest the size of the
distribution doesn't matter, if we nerf someone's system because of
something we're not doing correctly I think we should block on that.
So are we fine with the Windows and OS X criteria as originally
proposed? Adam, would these be better as beta blockers or as final
blockers?

"The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an
existing clean Windows installation and install a bootloader which can
boot into both Windows and Fedora."

"The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an
existing clean OS X installation and install a bootloader which can boot
into both OS X and Fedora, OR the installer must prominently warn the
user that he may be unable to boot OS X after installation, allowing the
user to cancel installation and reboot to OS X."

For the Linux criterion, how about this:

"The installer must be able to install into free space alongside
existing GNU/Linux installations supported by the upstream software for
detecting previously-installed operating systems, and install a
bootloader which can boot into each previous installation."

The intent of this is that if upstream os-prober supports it and (a)
Fedora breaks it or (b) it's unexpectedly broken due to a regression (my
language here is kind of ambiguous; not sure if that's good or bad),
then that's a blocker. It also implicitly applies to cases where
multiple GNU/Linux systems are installed. We would then replace this
criterion in the future if BLS is adopted.

I am entering this discussion a little late but better late than never.  As far as booting other linux installation, I would be happy if it would boot other Fedora or RHEL installation!!!  Currently, /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober is broken as far as other Fedora 21 installations because of the change to using "linux16" and "initrd16" for non-uefi systems.  This is something unique to Fedora and RHEL and, thus, is ignored by upstream grub support.

The problem is described here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1108296
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1108344

The resolution of the problem requires a change to os-prober and grub2.  os-prober has been updated but not grub2.

Question:  Why isn't this an alpha blocker. RHBZ#1108296 has a patch which fixes the problem.

Note:  without the fix you may be able to boot Umbuntu but not a second Fedora 21.  This makes not sense to me!

Personally, I do not use os-prober and prefer to create /etc/grub.d/40_custom files which use configfile to "chain-load" other configuration files.

Gene