[crabbone]

Configuration in Bourne Shell is already a bad idea, documented or not. Add on top of it is that there isn't really a configuration... you edit some files (multiple!) then you need to know to run some other script, that on different distribution of Linux will be called differently (if it at all exists) to generate this configuration from another configuration. And the added bonus is that this script will also sometimes run when upgrading some (typically completely unrelated) packages, and if you were so naive as to try and edit the configuration w/o running the script, your changes will be undone without warning.

Configurations are supposed to use a languages that is just powerful enough to express it. The more declarative the better. Shell is a very bad configuration language because it allows to do way too much and is very forgiving of errors.

Now, add to this that GRUB installation is trying to do configuration too... and if you are doing stuff like creating VM images or similar, where you have to install packages in an environment that's not a real physical computer with a bunch of periphery attached, you will run into all sorts of problems (because for some reason GRUB wants to have a PTY and a bunch of other devices / pseudo-filesystems that it has no business sticking its fingers into) and if you aren't present at the keyboard during package upgrade / install you might not even notice that GRUB has failed to install / install correctly.