FC4t2 no good without LILO

[Mike Bird]

On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 09:48, Pedro Fernandes Macedo wrote:
> And what relation Eclipse has to the lilo issue? None...

Pedro:

The relevance is that Redhat's excuse for replacing an essential tool
(Lilo) with an unreliable/inadequate/undocumented/defunct tool (Grub
Legacy) was that Lilo cost too much to support.  Redhat is putting a lot
of work into Eclipse - a product that few will need or use.  A tiny
fraction of the Eclipse effort would suffice to retain Lilo in Core.

We've shown that Redhat has not supported Lilo in years - Lilo just
works.  Pretty much all that Redhat needs to do is leave it alone and
let it be built and distributed automatically.


Redhat then claims that the cost is not in direct Lilo support but
rather for massive kludges that are needed in Anaconda and Up2date in
order to interface to Lilo.

We've shown that there are no such massive kludges - just a generic
structure in Grubby that's needed to support half a dozen boot loaders
on a variety of different architectures.


Redhat makes vague claims that the latest Grub handles RAID-1 and asks
us to test Grub yet again.  (Perhaps "ask" is an overstatement:  Redhat
once again pulled Lilo so we'd be forced to test their inferior
alternative.)

We've shown that Redhat has not provided documentation on using Grub
with RAID-1 in any of the logical places, and we've shown that the
obvious "grub-install --recheck /dev/md0" does not install Grub to any
of the MBR's.  Redhat has thus far been unable to tell us any new magic
spells for making Grub do what Redhat vaguely implies that Grub can now
do.  (There are, of course, many complex and error-prone workarounds,
but Redhat has been vaguely implying that those are no longer needed.)


This has become much more serious than a debate over whether or not
someone at Redhat is deliberately trying to cripple their product line. 
If Redhat does not soon substantiate their claims we will be forced to
entertain doubts as to the honesty of the developer of a product which
has root privileges on our systems.

--Mike Bird