[Debburn-devel] Filesystem image creators and GRUB support

[George Danchev]

Hi,

It is still not quite clear to me how the grub support of isofsmk(mkisofs 
1.13) would be (or is?) implemented if at all completed, however as discussed 
on irc grub2 source currently carries an embedded copy of much of what is used 
to be genisoimage. I was pointed to the following 'embedded copy' bugs: 570156 
and 570187, which is an undesirable situation.

My question list follows:

* Is there any specification what exactly is needed to prepare a GRUB bootable 
iso image, is none, what is the best approximation we should be looking at?

* As we all know mkisofs 1.13 is quite old and hardly maintainable code base 
so we would be better off to have that GRUB support implemented into code base 
we can move forward with (like libisofs), though I for one don't quite mind 
people hacking on mkisofs 1.13 aka isofsmk if they find it to be some fun ;-)

* Neither libisofs nor isofsmk support hfs overlays on the ISO, which 
basically means that they can prepare hfs-capable CDs suitable for pre-intel 
macs. Since I'm not familiar with hfs I can't quite judge what the impact 
would be in that case? To start dealing with that properly, getting hfsutils 
to export libhfs library would be the way to go, as also discussed on irc.

Ideally I can see the following resolution of that little mess in the future: 
* libisofs learns to prepare grub bootable iso images.
* libhfs is exported at some point, so it could be re-used with libisofs 
and/or others interested parties.
* embedded copies from grub2 and genisoimage got dropped for good.

That being said I'd love to see some planning before coding even more 
eventually unmaintainable solutions ;-)

-- 
pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB <people.fccf.net/danchev/key pgp.mit.edu>