At some point in the past when I installed grub, /boot/grub/menu.lst was created as a regular file and /boot/grub/grub.conf was created as a symlink to it. Recently, when I installed a new Red Hat kernel when mkinitrd-3.4.32-1 was installed, grub.conf was changed from a symlink to a regular file, different from menu.lst. As a result, I kept editing menu.lst and couldn't understand why my changes weren't having any effect. I think the tools which edit grub.conf need to understand that it may be a symbolic link and, if it is, preserve that link and edit the file to which it points.
agreed -- this will be in mkinitrd > 3.4.34