FC4t2 no good without LILO

Guy Fraser guy at incentre.net
Thu Apr 14 22:36:06 UTC 2005


Yet again... Hammer... Nail... The first struck the second 
perpendicular to the centre of the flat part on the top. 


On Thu, 2005-14-04 at 11:02 -0700, Mike Bird wrote:
> 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

OMG... why would you do that? ;-)

> 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





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