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Re: Considerations for lilo removal



On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 11:12:53AM -0400, David Duggins wrote:
> I would also have to say that the Linux Community has always been about 
> freedom and choice.

Not everyone agrees[1] about the choice part.

Having one well working tool is better than having multiple mediocre,
buggy tools to choose from.

> Although I use GRUB my self, why should we remove a
> useful package that is being used?

Most importatly bacause LILO is lacking maintainence. When facing
lack of manpower, something needs to be done. Eliminating duplicate
functionality is one way to reduce maintainence burden without
sacrificing overall set of features provided to endusers.

As a bonus it allows making documentation shorter as you don't
need to explain to new users which choice to select under which
circumstances, it could allow making debian-installer simpler
and thus more robust.

The alternative is to find someone who will to fix the bugs in LILO.

> GRUB and LILO fall into the category of Gnome vs. KDE....
> everybody has an opinion 
> on what they like best.  It doesn't nessicarily mean that one is really 
> that much better than the other.

It's not as black and white as you claim - removing LILO would not
lead to the logical conclusion that we should drop gnome or KDE.
There are many cases where having multiple choices is advantageous,
cases of mediocre tools with superior alternatives and large grey
and unclear area on between.

Grub and Lilo do a simple well defined task. It's much more muddier
for Desktop enviroinments, MTA's, editors or version managment software.
Picking up the best one is hard, and dropping other doesn't make any
sense when multiple of the tools are in active development and
maintainence.

Back to topic, I do not agree on the way Release team removed LILO
from lenny without warning. It also seems that grub/grub2 is not
really in any better condition than lilo - both have RC bugs...

Cheers,
Riku

[1] http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-January/msg00861.html

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