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Re: lilo about to be dropped?



Nenolod: sorry for the other mail.

William Pitcock wrote:
On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 13:06 -0300, Otavio Salvador wrote:
On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 9:21 PM, William Pitcock
<nenolod@sacredspiral.co.uk> wrote:
Lilo upstream is dead (no release in quite a while), but the lilo
maintainer has also been seen as saying in various mailing lists etc,
that since Debian patches lilo that he has no interest in helping to fix
problems in our version.
Ok but you could try to push those patches upstream. This is how
grub has been improved and also parted. This works most of time.

This way we "reduce" the amount of patches we keep in Debian
and also you could try to get in touch with other distros to share
the load and avoid reworking at same things.

lilo is officially unmaintained now. The canonical website of lilo now
points to a 404 error page, see http://lilo.go.dyndns.org/ .

as grub was not really maintained. Also grub2 doesn't seems so fast in
development.
I think these kind of project have difficult to maintain motivated
maintainer.

What do the other distributions?

extlinux seems the real alternative: the maintainer is active
in kernel boot since a lot of years, he has a good knowledge
of lilo (thus is not the usual: do a new project because I
cannot read/understand the old code).

OTOH hpa test always the boot changes in kernel, and
lilo is always tested, so in this regards, he take also
care about lilo.


I think we need a discussion of the fate of lilo at DebConf.
I volunteer to check and give you technical details of the
main boot loaders for i386/amd64 architecture, so that
we can decide better (and give inputs to upstream on what
they miss). Any interest in such talk?


BTW: my new laptop was saved by lilo ;-)
I installed grub (and Debian). Trying the Windows hidden partition
(to install windows), grub stopped working (it was rescue mode, but
without capability to rescue something). Also rescue disk +
reconfiguring + update-grub did nothing.
Installing lilo gave me a know boot environment, and it worked at
first try.  So: lilo should live!

ciao
	cate


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