Please revert to a single ipxe package. There was no compelling reason to split the GRUB support into a separate package.

Thanks!
Martin-Éric

Hi, the package ipxe is an architecture-independent package, which provides ipxe boot images for various platforms and might
be used to boot other machines, either physical or virtual, while grub-ipxe is an architecture-dependent package, which is
used to boot the installing machine. So I believe it is necessary to spilt them in two packages.

Cheers,

Miao Wang

The problem with spliting the package is that, upon upgrade, ipxe will loose its GRUB menu. This is not a desirable outcome.

Please revert this.

Thanks.

Hi,

Thanks for letting me know this problem. I understand your concern that
users installing the ipxe package will notice the grub menu is missing
after the upgrade. However, to support installing correct ipxe image(s)
for booting the current machine, as I have mentioned in #1093500, the
package should be arch-dependent. However, the ipxe package also provides
images for booting other machines (might be used with other softwares to
provide pxe booting services), which should be arch-independent. As a
result, the separation is necessary.

To overcome for the possible disruption to the users, I have added a
NEWS entry to notify the users who want a grub menu to install the split
ipxe-grub.

Cheers,

Miao Wang

ti 6.5.2025 klo 11.13 Miao Wang (shankerwangmiao@gmail.com) kirjoitti:

It is NOT necessary.

That's not gonna help. People will still lose their GRUB menu entry
upon upgrading. This could break their installation, if they're
expected to boot from PXE by default.

Martin-Éric

I believe it should be necessary.

Firstly, if the two packages are merged into one, there will be contradiction
on whether the resulting package should be arch-dependent or arch-independent
We now provide boot images for i386, amd64, arm64, riscv64, loong64. If the
combined ipxe packages is arch-independent, then users will see lots of
such images in /boot, most of which are useless due to mismatched architecture.
If the combined ipxe packages is arch-dependent, then it is not build-able on
riscv64 and loong64, because building images for x86-64 hosts (located in
/usr/lib/ipxe/) requires cross compiler targeting x86-64, which is not
available on riscv64 and loong64. As a result, it is necessary to split the
images for the two needs into two packages to overcome this contradiction.

Secondly, images to boot other machines and images and the menu entry to boot
the current machine are actually for two different purposes. A user who
wants to host a PXE boot server using iPXE boot images is unlikely to also
want to boot this sever into iPXE environment. A user who relies on iPXE
installed as a boot entry in the locally installed grub for booting is also
unlikely to need iPXE images in various formats for various platforms. As a
result, splitting the ipxe package is good for reducing unnecessary files
installed.

The package ipxe after the split now recommends ipxe-grub. So during the
upgrade, ipxe-grub will be automatically installed for normal users. If
a professional user specifies --no-install-recommends, then it is expected
that the NEWS will be carefully read and the need for ipxe-grub will be
carefully evaluated.

Cheers,

Miao Wang

1.21.1+git-20250829.969ce2c55+dfsg-1 made the situation much worse. Now, it doesn't even Recommends ipxe-grub anymore, nor does ipxe-grub Depends on ipxe. Seriously? Just put the GRUB support back into bin:ipxe already. Thanks.

Martin-Éric

Control: tags -1 wontfix


Hi,

According to my previous reply, the two packages cannot be merged,
since one is arch: all package and the other is arch: any package.

In the release of trixie, for smooth transition, ipxe was set to
recommend ipse-grub. After that, in the forky release cycle, the
dependency is removed, because the two packages can work well
independently, and they have no dependency on each other. I AM
serious about this change.

Cheers,

Miao Wang

Control: tags -1 wontfix


Hi,

According to my previous reply, the two packages cannot be merged,
since one is arch: all package and the other is arch: any package.

In the release of trixie, for smooth transition, ipxe was set to
recommend ipse-grub. After that, in the forky release cycle, the
dependency is removed, because the two packages can work well
independently, and they have no dependency on each other. I AM
serious about this change.

Cheers,

Miao Wang