Re: appropriate code for a GRUB-specific option

[Christoph Plattner <christoph.plattner@alcatel.at>]

I never wanted and want to violate against standards. Standards are
the most important thing in my opinion and the basic for the
UNIX world.

My idea - if good or not - was to say that the root path 'rp=' is
seen as 'GRUB root path' holding the 'menu.lst' (if we follow standards,
then only the path has to be defined, not the file name 'menu.lst' as
it can be seen as fixed name). So my idea was - the system booting over
net must interprete for itself, what "root path" is.

I have not read the RFCs up to now, but the interpretation of the
root path is OS specific. A root for computer is - generally speaking -
a director or partiton on a server, which is accessed as root device
on the client (over NFS, perhaps over Netbios or whatever......)

The kernel or OS then finds the string and interpretes this as
"path" on the server. 

GRUB also would do this. GRUB sees this as root for itself, where
stage1, stage2 and menu.lst are saved - in this case only 'menu.lst'
is saved. Do I violate a RFC standard in this way ?

If yes, please tell me, I am interested in strictly follow standards !!

Some word to tag 'T150' (code 150): As I experimented with tag 99, I
recognized, that not all codes can transport strings. Many of them
only accepst hexadecimal numbers. So I used '99' because this was an
example of the 'bootptab' manual page with the following lines
	<cut and paste>

	:

        # Special domain name server and option tags for next host
            butlerjct:ha=08002001560D:ds=128.2.13.42:\
                 :T37=0x12345927AD3BCF:\
                 :T99="Special ASCII string":\
                 :tc=.default:

So I saw - for my first test implementation - T99 works. I have not 
tested 150, if it also can transport strings.

But it is a good idea to define the code *now* !

With friendly regards

	Christoph Plattner


OKUJI wrote:
> 
> From: Christoph Plattner <christoph.plattner@alcatel.at>
> Subject: Re: appropriate code for a GRUB-specific option
> Date: Mon, 29 May 2000 09:12:32 +0200
> 
> > We should consider, that a server admin has to define bootp (or dhcp)
> > to allow diskless booting of grub.To define the boot file the
> > 'bf=' option is used. So we should overthink, if we should not use
> > another tag, which is normaly used and reserved, but which is not
> > used in context of GRUB. For example the root-path 'rp='. Why can
> > GRUB not have the root path for itself to find his own 'menu.lst' ?
> 
>   I don't think your idea is nice at all. Not only there is no
> advantage of that, but also that would make the development
> difficult. Have you thought of why it is important to comply with a
> standard? The reason is not just that this ensures software
> compatibility. When a programmer begins to develop a software package,
> she expects that it should comply with some standards, not violating
> them. If the implementation falls short of her expectation, she will
> be confused and angry, and will say, "Oh hell! The maintainer is crazy
> as a bedbug."
> 
>   There seems not to be any better idea, so I decide that we'll use
> 150 for GRUB (by default). Ken, if you don't like that, let me know
> soon. Once we start using 150 actually, it would be hard to change it
> later.
> 
> Okuji

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