Bug#587886: future of maintaining of the bootloader LILO
Gentlemen,
I just subscribed to this bug log as an interested party.
Allow me to put in my two cents worth, if I may.
(1) On behalf of Debian's lilo users, of which I am one,
please do not remove lilo from the distribution. I used lilo
for many years. When the default boot loader changed to grub
version 1, I went with grub version 1. But when grub version 2
became the default with Squeeze, it wouldn't work for me.
I switched back to lilo, and I have been using it ever since.
And lots of other users use it too. It has a very loyal following.
(2) William Pitcock is obviously a very smart man and a
very capable maintainer; and I have nothing personal against him;
but by making public statements such as "lilo has no future",
"let the damn thing die already", "nobody cares what you want",
and other similar comments, he has, in my humble opinion,
disqualified himself as a legitimate candidate for lilo's
maintainer, regardless of how great his technical skills
may be. A maintainer should nourish and cherish his package,
not try to kill it off. Putting William in charge of lilo
is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. The fox
does not have the hens' best interests at heart.
I am currently using Joachim's lilo 23.0 on my Dell OptiPlex GX400,
and it works flawlessly for me. That's not to say that it has
no bugs: it probably does. But to say that it has no merit is
going too far. I also have an old Pentium II machine, as William
does. I'm going to try out lilo 23.0 there next.
I also am volunteering to help out, whether in an official capacity
or an unofficial capacity I really don't care.
lilo's recent problems are mostly due to a change made to the
official Debian stock kernel image package maintainer scripts for
Lenny, which essentially broke the support for lilo, although no-one
realized it at the time. (See Debian bug number 505609.) Everyone
assumed that lilo's map installer was being run following a kernel
upgrade, but it wasn't. Everyone assumed that lilo had some kind
of fatal flaw. But it wasn't lilo's fault. I am the one who found
the cause of that problem. It has been fixed now in the latest stable
point release (5.0.5); but for Squeeze, the kernel people would not
reinstate the kernel maintainer scripts' historic support for lilo.
Hook scripts are now required to make lilo work properly under Squeeze,
and /etc/kernel-img.conf must also be set up properly. Those trying
to migrate to lilo from grub will have trouble if they don't set up
the environment properly. See my unofficial custom kernel-building
web page, http://www.wowway.com/~zlinuxman/Kernel.htm, under "Step 10:
Customizing the kernel installation environment", for more details.
Joachim may be a little green, but he wants to see lilo succeed.
And that is the most important qualification, in my opinion.
Respectfully submitted.
--
.''`. Stephen Powell
: :' :
`. `'`
`-
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