GRUB 1.98 packaging issues

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

While upgrading GRUB from 1.97.2 to 1.98 in Nixpkgs(-libre) [0, 1], I
noticed the following regressions:

  - GNU gettext is now required to build the ‘.mo’ files but not checked
    for at configure time.  When it’s not available, ‘make install’
    fails because the ‘.mo’ files weren’t built.

  - tests/util/grub-*.in refer to /bin/bash, which does not necessarily
    exist (it doesn’t exist on NixOS GNU/Linux).  Instead, it should
    either use ‘AC_PATH_PROG([BASH], [bash])’ and substitute address@hidden@’,
    or use /bin/sh if no Bash-specific features are used.

  - tests/util/grub-shell.in refers to ‘qemu-system-i386’, but
    apparently it should always be ‘qemu-system-x86_64’, even on i686
    (that’s at least the case with QEMU 0.12.3).

  - Again, QEMU is a new dependency and it should be checked for at
    configure time.  The tests requiring QEMU could be skipped when it’s
    not available.

  - When running the tests, I was getting test failures and messages
    like this:

      chardev: opening backend "stdio" failed
      qemu: could not open serial device 'stdio': Invalid argument

    I found the thread at
    <http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg22775.html>.
    Adding the ‘-nodefaults’ option fixed the problem for me (again QEMU
    0.12.3.)

Thanks,
Ludo’.

[0] http://nixos.org/nixpkgs/
[1] http://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixpkgs/trunk/grub2

pgpCcIKfGC9rr.pgp
Description: PGP signature