Grub2 and multiple boot different ubuntu versions

[Colin Law]

Hi

I had a double boot setup with XP and Karmic.  I installed Lucid Beta
1 in a separate partition and on boot it gives me the menu with Lucid
at the top followed by Karmic kernels and XP, and all works well.  As
Lucid is just for testing, however, I want it do default to Karmic
boot so I set GRUB_DEFAULT=5 in /etc/default/grub, run sudo
update-grub and again all is well.
Each time the Lucid kernel is updated, however, I need to add two to
GRUB_DEFAULT as there are new kernels above it.  I wonder whether it
is possible to rearrange the grub menu so Karmic is at the top and I
can leave the default at 0.  I have contemplated booting into Karmic
and running update-grub but I hesitate to do this in case it is a bad
idea, not really understanding how grub works.
It would be nice if grub allowed a regex setting for the default boot
when specifying a string, defaulting to the first matching name, but I
have not seen this in the docs.  It would seem like a trivial
extension.

Colin