A rant regarding LILO and various other related issues

Guy Fraser guy at incentre.net
Mon Apr 18 19:29:37 UTC 2005


On Sat, 2005-16-04 at 20:57 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On Fri 15 Apr 2005 19:13, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
> 
> > > I find the arrogance of the Fedora team in failing to facilitate this
> > > minority rather disturbing.
> >
> >   If you are referring primarily to this thread, then it's crystal clear
> > that the arrogance has been coming from those most vociferously critical
> > of the decision to remove lilo.  You can have your objections to it, but
> > I find it quite disturbing that ANYONE could support calling the
> > developers "morons" and "tards" as somehow justified, despite attempts
> > by those doing the insulting to engage in not-so-clever sophistry in the
> > service of that false justification.
> 
> I have only been following this thread sporadically,
> and wasn't aware that anyone had used those terms.
> I would certainly dissociate myself completely from any talk like that. 
> 

Nobody started by using those terms. This issue is an OLD long 
running issue. I believe the fight to keep LILO started with 
FC1 when many people noticed GRUB was causing them problems 
and was the default boot loader. It all came to a head with 
the removal of LILO. After having been given little help and 
only a few responses from the developers after having problems 
with GRUB and having all requests to keep LILO ignored, many 
people are quite upset with the developers for being ignored 
and sometimes even being insulted for asking questions that 
have been asked numerous times but have never been resolved.

This thread started off with someone asking if LILO could 
be reintroduced since GRUB was giving them a lot of grief.
Expecting an unreasonable response from the developers which
has been the general attitude of the developers which has 
been ongoing and pervasive, I responded that the developers 
would not listen and did not care. I called the developers 
tards, which is not short for retard, but is a colloquial 
for : Someone without intellectual impairment that *chooses* 
to act in a way that would cause grief to themselves or 
others. That is how it is used, in my area and was intended.

> I've actually found the developers I have communicated with
> very willing to help - but of course I did not start by calling them morons!

I have provided patches to Redhat in the past and not 
only was I not given credit for the patch, but one of
the developers names was included in the changelog as 
having provided the patch. Having provided many patches 
directly to the original software developers, as well 
as FreeBSD, I know that it is not standard fare for 
developers to claim credit for a patch.

> 
> I was probably wrong to use the word "arrogant" -
> but I was dissapointed that there seemed to be no response
> from the developers to the fairly numerous calls for LILO to be available
> as a choice when installing Fedora.

I am not so sure, "arrogant" is much better than what I 
used, but I have become very frustrated with the attitude 
of developers on this and other similar matters. Many 
excuses are given for dropping a package, but when tested 
the reasons change and contradict each other to the point 
that the only discernible reason is that it was an arbitrary 
choice by the steering committee, and we should not have 
questioned them in the first place.

> I assume it is still a choice when compiling and installing a kernel -
> I mean LILO will be updated if one is using that.
> 

Assume nothing, that is very likely not going to be supported.

> > > Incidentally, the interactive option in grub, which you praise,
> > > could be greatly improved;
> >
> >   Possibly, but keep in mind that this has to fit in a pretty small
> > amount of memory, if I'm not mistaken.  There's only so much that can be
> > added due to space constraints.  At least grub HAS a command line.
> 
> As I said, I use grub all the time, and have been saved more than once
> by the grub command line option.
> (In my experience grub is likely to get confused
> if one has IDE and SCSI disks.)

Having little choice, I rearranged the drives so I could put 
my smallest drive on the slow {ATA66} on-board controller to 
use as a boot drive, so that GRUB would work if I changed 
any of my non boot drives.

> 
> I guess the real weakness of grub is its lack of good documentatiion -
> LILO certainly wins hands down on that score.

<HUMOUR>
That is sacrilege, how dare you insult the vast and 
comprehensive scriptures on diagnosing problems with 
GRUB. Don't you realize that GRUB is infallible and 
only through your own gross incompetence would GRUB 
not be able to BOOT your improperly configured non 
standard system. Now please confess your sins, and 
make a sacrifice.
</HUMOUR>

> 
> -- 
> Timothy Murphy  
> e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
> tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
> s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
> 
-- 
Guy Fraser
Network Administrator
The Internet Centre
1-888-450-6787
(780)450-6787




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