[Bug 188445] Review Request: bootconf

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Summary: Review Request: bootconf


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=188445





------- Additional Comments From mdehaan at redhat.com  2006-05-12 09:49 EST -------
I'm just trying to provide useful feedback here, so please take these comments
as such.

Yes, I understand it's *NOT* a multiple bootloader configuration tool, and I'm
asking *why* it isn't.  The kernel boot command line is owned by the bootloader,
and you're configuring the bootloader -- so the question is relevant.  Have you
looked at grubby and booty?  If not, please do.

I ran the app, and yes, it allows configuration of just *three* kernel boot
parameters.  There are many more kernel boot options than this, why pick just
these three?  This seems to be of limited value, and I'm asking these questions
to understand why the tools out there aren't already doing the job.  If we want
to provide human-understandable editing of these options for people who don't
know what they do, well, aren't these people capable of editing grub.conf?  For
those that aren't, a full list of arguments would make a lot more sense -- and
this should be integrated into something that is also capable of adding and
removing kernels/initrds and general bootloader configuration.

Only being able to edit 3 options doesn't seem useful to me.  Maybe I'm not
seeing something.  But if such a tool were to be included, I would expect it
should be able to include most *any* kernel option, and it should support
multiple bootloaders because such support is already provided free via grubby
and booty.  This would include kickstart options, root options, and so forth.

The code also is totally commentless, for what it's worth.  I did not look much
deeper than this because of the lack of comments, and that I am unable to run
pychecker on it.

>From README:

"""
bootconf will search and update every "kernel" line in grub.conf, setting the
requested options.  When reading the existing boot configuration, bootconf
parses only the first kernel entry in grub.conf
"""

While the 3 arguments in question are fairly harmless, in general kernel
parameter customization should affect a selected kernel or a selected list of
kernels, not every kernel.  From running the GUI, that intended behavior is not
obvious.

The app also just throws an IOError when invoked with an account that can't read
/etc/grub.conf, versus allowing the user to authenticate or throwing up a more
helpful warning message.



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