Re: LILO

[Arthur Korn <arthur@korn.ch>]

Hi

Russell Coker schrieb:
> On Thursday 10 May 2001 13:47, Robert van der Meulen wrote:
> > I don't know if this has come up before, but would it be
> > useful to have a Provides: boot-loader for lilo, as well as
> > for 'grub' (and other bootloaders), and have the packages
> > currently depending on 'lilo' depend on 'boot-loader' ?  I'm
> > having a hard time keeping 'lilo' off my system, as i use
> > grub.
> 
> Sounds like a reasonable idea.  But I think that part of the
> problem is unnecessary dependencies.

?

> Kernel images produced by kernel-package depend on lilo.
> Machines which boot with grub, loadlin, syslinux, "cat
> /boot/vmLinuz > /dev/fd0", and other boot methods don't need
> lilo.  NFS-root machines never need a boot loader (whatever
> method is used to load the kernel is outside the control of
> the OS).

Using a virtual package would make exactly this possible, and a
boot-loader-dummy package (or plain use of equivs) can be used
in the cases where you don't wan't any boot-loader at all.

> Maybe the solution would be a task-boot-loader package which

Oh my god, please don't! A task package (or a meta package for
that matter) would be another centralisation of distributed
information that has to be kept up to date. Virtual packages are
far more elegant.

ciao, 2ri
-- 
Prof:    So the American government went to IBM to come up with a data
         encryption standard and they came up with ...
Student: EBCDIC!"