Subject: bug#56582: Installer does not detect or allow detection of other bootable partitions

From: Peter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2022 16:44:17 -0400

Hi,

My concern is that what is written in the manual for bootloader-config and
invoking-guix-system does not clearly communicate what needs to be done for
those who have no exposure to either Guix or Scheme. I did actually view
those entries at first, but it seemed theoretical at first glance and I
kept moving because I was looking for an expected binary.

To expand on this, Guix installs GRUB. This is undeniable, and this is
where the problem begins.. over many years users are accustomed to GRUB
working in a certain way with specific tools.. when they encounter a grub
installation without grub-mkconfig, etc. they are at a loss, because it's a
binary they expected to find and it's just not present. I think an argument
could be made here that this behaviour breaks user space because it's
established software, but changed to function differently as opposed to
being something entirely new. It's like wearing your shoes on the opposite
foot. You can do it, but it feels wrong.

The way Debian and other distros manage Grub is via mkconfig, and the boot
menu presented is very similar to Guix's, the only difference is that
there's an extra row entry in the grub menu for the Windows bootloader to
be launched.

Personally, I dislike Grub because I feel it complicates things. I would
love to use only UEFI and use only the bios boot menu to switch, but for
whatever reason in a single internal drive system, this isn't easily done.
Giving an example, awhile back, I tried installing a distro to an external
usb drive.. it worked.. but the problem is that it installed grub to the
internal drive.. and if you removed the usb drive from the pc, things would
break because now a device it was expecting to see wasn't there. A
workaround suggested was to disconnect the internal drive, do the setup,
this way Grub would be on the external drive, then reconnect the internal
drive and then I guess use the bios uefi menu to switch between, a lot of
bother for a tightly sealed unit.

The way MS's bootloader works is nice because one of the menu options it
has is to pick a physical device so you can actually boot from a valid
bootable USB flash drive device and it launches that device directly.

Maybe the solution is just to create an EFI partition at the front of all
drives including external as Apple does and then it doesn't matter what
bootloader you use or do not use, because you could always just use the
UEFI menu to point to a device. Not using a bootloader would reduce
complexity of maintenance.. if MS's bootloader is there, people can use it
if they want to point to the device, and if it is not there, then they can
use the uefi bios menu. In theory.

MBR folks would still need to continue using a bootloader of course.

Best,
Peter

On Sat, Jul 16, 2022 at 6:32 AM Julien Lepiller <[email-masked]> wrote:

> If anything, you also need to chainload to boot on haiku, which is free
> software. So no reason not to implement it.
>
> Le 16 juillet 2022 11:59:29 GMT+02:00, Josselin Poiret <[email-masked]>
> a écrit :
>>
>> Hello both of you,
>>
>> Julien Lepiller <[email-masked]> writes:
>>
>>> Of course this is only a workaround I'm proposing, we should fix the installer to detect other OSs.
>>>
>> Just adding that we don't have any Guix bootloader entry field to
>> chainload into another bootloader, needed for some non-free system :)
>> this would need to be added as well.
>>
>> I personally don't mind, and use my UEFI boot menu instead if I want to
>> boot into said non-free OS.
>>
>> Best,
>> --
>> Josselin Poiret
>>
>>