FC4t2 no good without LILO

[Mike Bird]

On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 20:51, Matthew Miller wrote:
> You're missing a huge part of the picture. Having lilo the package (even
> though as you note, it's not really maintained) might not be much, but it
> requires a lot of complicated kludgy infrastructure in the installer, and in
> mkinitrd, etc., and makes kernel updates very fragile.

Based on a quick browse of the sources:

The functionality is mostly encapsulated in two neat little programs
called grubby and new-kernel-package that are part of the mkinitrd
package.  Sensibly, they are mostly generic, with small tables and small
code sections devoted to Grub, Yaboot, Lilo, Silo, Zipl, and Elilo.

Anaconda also has small amounts of loader specific code - mostly in the
UI.

up2date has boot-loader specific code, but only because it doesn't use
grubby (except for grub).  The true cost of supporting Lilo in up2date
is negligable because grubby should be doing the work.

Thus Lilo costs a couple of hundred lines of simple code - simple code
which already exists.  Anaconda and Grubby and Up2date already handle
several kinds of boot loaders and that generality must be retained in
order to support the several different architectures.

I do not see any massive savings resulting from removing any complicated
kludgy infrastructure in the installer.

OK, now you can bring out the clue-by-fours.  What complicated kludgy
infrastructure that's needed for Lilo but not needed for all the other
boot loaders did I miss?

--Mike Bird