Comment # 9 on bug 947593 from Josef Reidinger

(In reply to Roman Bysh from comment #7)
> Josef,
> 
> This is an extreme disappointment for the openSUSE community user. In fact,
> we worked very hard with Michael Chang over a number of months to add these
> features so that the Yast Boot Loader finally evolved. And offered something
> the other distros did not offer.
> 
> This took a number of years of begging on Bugzilla and email until we found
> the right people that understood our requests.
> 
> The openSUSE Leap 42.1 distro - which has incorporated the core from SuSE
> Enterprise is supposed to be a step up in stability and features. You have
> downgraded the Yast Boot Loader.

Same change is done also in SuSE Enterprise. It is not downgrading only
opensuse. We use same version for opensuse and SLE.

> 
> The upgrade from Grub1 to Grub2 introduced a boot loader that uses scripts.  
> In their haste, the developers had forgotten to allow the user to edit and
> customize their entries. At least in Grub1 we could edit the "menu.lst"
> file. 

To make it clarify:

1) you still can edit final generated config, but it will be overwritten, so
you need to copy your manually crafted version over it again.

2) grub2 have many options how to affect script, one of it is /etc/default/grub
where is simple config option and among them is DISTRIBUTOR, which can be
manually adjusted and YaST2 will respect it.

> 
> Many appreciate the ability to customize via the gui so that they can clean
> up the entries according to their work environment. The Grub2 scripts hunt
> down the entries without regard of the appearance of the entry. Now you want
> to go back to this in 2015-2016?

No, my goal is to make gui reasonably small, as too many entries confuse not so
experienced users. As I said, we do not limit your expert changes in config.
But goal of YaST is not to provide all options available in config file in gui,
but to provide consistent UI that helps users with common operations in easy
way.
And to be honest changing distributor is not common nor critical, because
system will boot without such change and default is reasonable enough.

> 
> Our entries appears as: 
> openSUSE 42.1 Beta 1 (x86_64) (on /dev/sdb1) 
> 
> We do not like this. We want it to appear as:
> openSUSE 42.1 Beta 1 


This is not affected by distributor field. Distributor field is "openSUSE 42.1
Beta 1". arch and location is added by grub2 script and setting distributor do
not help you.

> 
> or whatever in the final release.
> 
> Can you at least offer another Yast Boot Loader with the "Distribution"
> option in the Leap 42.1 repository.

It is not option as bootloader is used in installer, so we need unified
version. Of course you can build your own version in your build service home
with reverted patch -
https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/yast/yast-bootloader/pull/260.patch

(In reply to Roman Bysh from comment #8)
> The reason for disabling the "Distributor field" in the gui/ncurses version
> of the Yast Boot Loader is an unrealistic reason for removal when using a
> text-based tool such as zypper.

It is very often used way how to upgrade opensuse distributions. SLE do not
support it, so it is opensuse mainly way to upgrade distribution and in
installation it is needed to have reasonable good default ( empty distributor
flag ). Ability to change it can cause more harm then benefit for newbie users
if they change it.

> 
> Why not remove the gui fields for "Vga mode" or "Console resolution"? You
> can always edit and add them to the "Optional Kernel Command Line
> Parameters" field. 

To be honest I already considering it, but in the end there is part of users
that need it ( due to bad firmware of graphic card ) and e.g. vga mode helps
users to pick correct resolution and same for console resolution. So it is
critical for part of users to boot and helps them to have bootable system.

> 
> It's the same difference. You are penalizing the functional gui use field on
> the Yast Boot Loader because there is a limitation of a text-based
> installation tool.

It is not text-based installation tool. It is upgrade tool. Regarding
penalizing...I need to have balance in UI, we cannot always add fields. I e.g.
add ability to set password for bootloader which is non-trivial task and more
people use it then changing distributor field. Even now there is three tabs
which looks too much for me and I am trying to reduce it only to reasonable
options.