A rant regarding LILO and various other related issues

[John Morris]

On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 20:07, Chris Adams wrote:

> GRUB is not "broken" in a RAID1 environment (broken to me means it
> doesn't work at all).  It doesn't do what you'd like, but that is
> because it works differently.  All it takes to install GRUB on multiple
> members of a software RAID1 /boot is (this is from a kickstart I have
> around, although I haven't tried it in a while):

Broken in the sense that a non expert isn't likely to recover from
common failure modes like installing or updating Windows and losing the
MBR.  If you aren't doing RAID1 you have easy options, the best being to
install Grub into the root partition instead of the MBR or at least
being able to boot a rescue CD and just saying "grub-install /dev/hda". 
With a RAID1 and Grub you had better be a wizard.

Yes there has been a lot of patching for FC4t1 to address these issues,
but it would be hubris to think enough diverse systems have been tested
at this stage of the game.  Booting is one of the only areas that have
to deal with 16bit real mode BIOS biodiversity hell.

> No, it is the time for those that think there is a problem to test the
> fix (that is the point of test releases and this mailing list).  If
> nobody reports any problems with the test release, then the developers
> will assume that the problem is fixed and move on.  If LILO users are
> doing nothing but ranting and calling people names, they'll never know
> if the fix works for them, so the developers won't find out if there are
> still corner cases that need work.

Hey, I finally made peace with Grub to the point where I can use it. But
I ain't a newbie and I don't particularly like that it is HARDER to use
if you want to do anything unusual.  It is probably going to remain
being a badly ported BSD/HURD solution with it's alien (to a linux user)
drive naming conventions.  Yes Grub has a command line mode.  Big whoop,
if something goes wrong I boot a rescue disc instead because that
solution WILL work, and has worked often enough in the past I'm
comfortable with it.

It makes perfect sense to make Grub the default boot loader because a)
it has been for several years and does work for most users, b) it is
destined to be the only one eventually and c) as the default it will be
tested.  But if there are any scenarios where Grub still fails those
users are going to be gone and I can't blame them if they don't come
back.

> Fedora is not a "perpetual beta release".

You must be using a different Fedora than I do. It ain't Rawhide or Sid,
but it certainly isn't what I'd call a production OS.  It is exactly
what it is advertised as, a testbed.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris     This post is 100% M$Free!
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