Ugly GRUB menu entries

[Denis Washington]

Am 18.01.2012 12:43, schrieb Colin Watson:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 08:32:35AM +0000, Paul Sladen wrote:
>> I think it's an excellent idea to streamline the Grub menu.  Could you
>> perhaps try to mock up before/after "screenshots", so that it's clear
>> each change that you'd like to make?
>
> As the Ubuntu GRUB maintainer I'd prefer text.  Since we aren't going to
> be making large changes to the visual layout at least in this cycle,
> text should be quite sufficient, and much less work for bug reporters
> too.

I didn't want to imply any visual changes, this is just about the text.

> I think there are bugs about most of this already.  The main source of
> tedium is that we don't have reliable data for all of this.  Finding the
> Windows boot loader at all in a consistent way is more of a pain than
> you might think, and even with Ubuntu you have the question of how to
> deal with kernels that originated with old Ubuntu releases but that are
> associated with more recent userspace.

As to Windows, the only problem I actually have is the appended and 
(seemingly) meaningless "(loader)" in the description, which (I guess?) 
is easy to remove.

I understand that it is probably not possible to relate kernel to Ubuntu 
versions, but if all kernel releases with the same userspace would have 
the corresponding Ubuntu version number, that would be more than enough. 
Also, it would be nice if the kernel version would only be shown if 
there are really multiple kernels to boot, e.g.:

Ubuntu 12.04 (kernel 3.0.2-9-generic)
Ubuntu 12.04 (kernel 3.0.2-8-generic)

when there are two kernels installed, but only

Ubuntu 12.04

if there is just one.

Even nicer would be if there only were entries for the newest and the 
"last known good" kernel, like this:

Ubuntu 12.04
Ubuntu 12.04 (last known good)

but this probably needs quite a lot more changes (probably not limited 
to GRUB itself).

>
>> If you're not sure where to file these;  you're welcome to file them
>> against "Ubuntu branding" for the moment:
>>
>>    http://launchpad.net/ubuntu-branding/+filebug?field.title=Grub:+streamline+boot+entries
>
> No need for a layer of indirection; the correct package is grub2 in
> Ubuntu.

I filed a bug against "grub" (now moved to "grub2") today with some more 
details:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/918041

Regards,
Denis