Comment 10 for bug 463015

I started a discussion about this patch on the mailing list, which you can view here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2009-10/msg00450.html

Here's a short summary:
 * there was some code to address the most important aspects of the misdetection problem, but it was commented out (and is scheduled to be reincluded at some point).
 * we agree that the existing commented out code would solve most practical misdetection problems.
 * we agree that it is almost impossible to solve all practical misdetection problems.
 * we disagreed about my patch: the maintainers thought that my patch could introduce new problems, whereas I claim there is no possibility of introducing new problems. The maintainers declined to spell out their concerns.

What should be done?
 * at the moment, the misdetection problem is severe... if you reformat a FAT or NTFS partition as your root ext3/4 partition, you should expect your system to not boot with grub2! (My computer became unbootable, which is how I found the problem.)
 * it is possible that many people will be affected. Certainly, thousands of people were affected by such problems when I maintained (lib)parted (before we improved our detection heuristics.)
 * my patch solves the problem
 * the commented out code probably solves of the problem
 * I think Ubuntu should either apply one of the patches ASAP, or revert to a more stable version of Grub (with the commented out code included.)