Re: lilo about to be dropped?
On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 17:40 +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
> William Pitcock wrote:
> > On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 17:26 +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
> >> Frans Pop wrote:
> >>> On Monday 06 April 2009, Christian Perrier wrote:
> >>>> Quoting William Pitcock (nenolod@dereferenced.org):
> >>>>> lilo is due for removal anyway due to being unmaintained upstream and
> >>>>> the widespread availability of alternatives.
> >>> I think that last part is debatable.
> >>>
> >>>>> I do not have time to manage the removal at this point, but it will
> >>>>> be gone by June.
> >>> Has the package already been offered for adoption? Preferably with an
> >>> overview of its current (upstream) status and main issues. I'd say that
> >>> if there's anybody willing to (actively) maintain it, it should not be
> >>> removed.
> >>>
> >>>> This is a heads up mail for the D-I team.
> >>> I'm not sure where the original mail comes from, but IMO this should be
> >>> discussed on d-devel, especially since it impacts more than just D-I. I
> >>> suspect there are quite a few packages that make some sort of provisions
> >>> for lilo.
> >>> There are also significant numbers of people still using lilo for, at
> >>> least for them, very good reasons.
> >> I totally agree.
> >> But I think that lilo package description must be changed, warning new
> >> users that lilo have several limits (thus not all kernel within debian
> >> are bootable with lilo).
> >>
> >> Maybe we could also require grub{,2} when installing lilo (chained
> >> as other in lilo, for emergency, new debian kernel policies, etc),
> >> but I don't know if it is feasible (e.g. when lilo is not in MBR).
> >
> > chainloader will work with lilo, but lilo is only kept around for the
> > people who are crazy and booting off LVMs as it is.
>
> Yes, but it works if you have an additional partition (for boot
> record). I don't know if they could live in the same partition
> (with some magic).
>
> But IIRC lilo fails also in other cases: some xen immages, on very big
> images (which can be reached in some initram).
>
> > Booting off LVMs is supported directly by grub2 and ext2linux could
> > probably be modified to support it in a much better way than lilo does
> > it, so this is not really a compelling argument for keeping it.
>
> What is ext2linux? packages.d.o and google doesn't give me relevant
> informations.
Oops. It is extlinux. It's syslinux except it boots off a hard-disk
instead of a floppy or CD. Quite similar to lilo in featureset.
William
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