lilo vs grub

Mark Mielke mark at mark.mielke.cc
Tue Oct 21 18:12:16 UTC 2003


On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 11:58:47AM -0400, Janina Sajka wrote:
> Mark Mielke writes:
> > Your other arguments, I suspect are due to incomplete knowledge of grub,
> > of which at least some of the blame could be put on the difficult to
> > read/understand info pages that grub comes with.
> I'll ignore the insult for the moment.

Obviously, you didn't, as below, you add your own insults. If you want
to make this personal, don't pretend you haven't.

> Let me remind you that my four issues have not been resolved by the
> several people who have written in response to my post yesterday. Every
> response was inadequate because it failed to address the issue.

"Adequate" by *whose* criteria? Yours? The people who would whine for
several posts about having to enter a command twice? The people who
want a click-click solution? The only concern I've seen that is valid,
is the claim that lilo works on hardware that grub doesn't, which would
indeed be a strong issue.

> But, since you seem to need to be spoon fed, here's one issue.
> Please tell me how I am to know when grub is available to me? Remember,
> I don't see the screen, and I don't use a braille display (like your dad
> does). So, how do I know that it's now Grub Time?
> Please make your answer unambiguous. I don't want to hear about hard
> drive activity, etc. 
> This was my issue #1 yesterday. No one responded to it.
> It's a showstopper, in my view.

In my view, you should stop whining about something like a beep, and submit
a patch to grub that adds the beep. We're talking about a one-line patch,
in all likelihood. Re-build grub with this patch, and quite easily, you have
the functionality that you desire. Open source gives you this freedom.

Your choice is not "LILO vs GRUB". Your choice also includes making
sure that *EVERYBODY* has the *BEST* alternative available to them,
which may include ensuring that either LILO or GRUB provides *ALL* of
the features that the other does, allowing for *SHARED* development,
rather than religiously segregated development.

I happen to believe that GRUB has significantly more potential as a generic
boot loader than LILO does. This being the case, I strongly encourage GRUB
to be fixed.

Then again - I'm not timid about getting my fingers dirtying by wandering
around in the source code...

mark

-- 
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