[augeas-devel] Support for Debian's update-grub (ticket #50)

[David Lutterkort]

I just committed Raphael's patch for ticket #50, and this is in no way
meant as a criticism of him or the patch - I am actually amazed by how
quickly he pulled the patch off.

Having said that, I am not really happy with this patch, mostly to do
with how update-grub works. The marker comments that update-grub relies
on ("Start/End Default Options") causes us to deal with gigantic
regexps; typechecking grub.aug now takes 10s on my machine (before it
took 0.2s), mostly because we have to subtract those gigantic markers
out of the standard comment regexp. Besides making typechecking slow,
this undoubtedly has an effect on Augeas' memory consumption, since big
regexps lead to big regexp matchers.

I am not sure how to best proceed with this addition; I am very
reluctant to release with the grub lens as it is right now, mostly
because of the memory overhead that everybody has to pay, even on
non-Debian systems.

What do people see as viable options ? Revert the patch and have Debian
patch the Debian specific bits back in ? Lean on the update-grub authors
to fix it to use a saner format (though that won't help with existing
systems) ?

David