Re: ISO installer image: GPT versus MBR partitions

["Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net>]

Hi,

i wrote:
> >   --file-system-type=iso9660[_$variation]

Danny Milosavljevic wrote:
> I'm not sure yet.  We have a lot of special-casing for iso9660
> already.  If anything, at that point, we could pass an arbitrary list
> of options or something (an "environment" if you will.  Hah).

How ever the options are brought to the grub-mkrescue run and the script,
i strongly urge not to expose all possible combinations of MKRESCUE_SED*
variables to the ISO production process.
Four consistent variations will be enough and avoid riddling failures.


> The problem is that there were horrible security problems in bash and that
> made a lot of distributions switch to a more minimal shell ("dash") for
> scripts.

It is supposed to run on dash, ksh, and BSD sh versions.


> we patch grub-mkrescue to use an absolute path for mformat and mcopy
> in order to make them predictable.

How deep shall this go ? dd, awk, od, head, find, test, mv, rm, ...


> > > For example in grub-mkrescue-sed.sh there's no "-e" in the shebang

> > Is it conservative enough to add it ?

> It will exit the shell when one of the toplevel commands has an
> exit status != 0.

But do all reasonable shells support -e ?
(I must dig in man ksh down to builtin command -set to get confirmation.)


> > That's why i brought a Guile re-write into consideration.
> > Firstly it would be the language of choice and secondly it would make
> > Guix independent of my ideas how it should be done.

> We're not trying to become iso bootloader experts ourselves :)

Currently Guix ISO production is not enough boss over what gets into the
ISO image. Neither with EFI partition properties nor with partition table
type.


> For now, let's try the shell script and make it more paranoid.

Please report all changes (and be ready to motivate them).


Have a nice day :)

Thomas