OT: Sabotage was Re: GIMP 2.8

Tom H tomh0665 at gmail.com
Tue May 1 10:01:03 UTC 2012


On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 11:15 AM, stan <gryt2 at q.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:21:08 -0400
> Tom Horsley <horsley1953 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:26:39 +0200
>> Karel Volný wrote:
>>
>> > I hope there doesn't exist one more step before like "in previous
>> > iteration, users were bad to us, so let's break some feature to
>> > do harm to them" :-)
>>
>> I have yet another theory - what if it is deliberate sabotage
>> by people who would profit from the destruction of open
>> source?
>>
>> http://home.comcast.net/~tomhorsley/game/gnome3-rant.html
>
> When I started reading about grub2 (which I think should be called
> lilo2), I noticed that disks still start at 0, but partitions now start
> at 1 (or is it vice versa?). Anyhow, I got this image in my head of a
> bunch of Microsoft guys sitting around enjoying the snacks after a
> meeting, and laughing as they thought about introducing this confusion.
> One of them then suggests that in the next revision, they'll flip it so
> that disks start at 1 and partitions at 0 to introduce even more
> confusion. Probably pure fantasy, as entropy and 'let's write this from
> scratch to improve it' is enough to explain the change and its
> confusion. But whenever I see something like the grub change, or the
> one described here, in a linux program, I think of that image and get a
> chuckle instead of getting irate.  Well, less irate, anyway.  ;-)

There's a difference between grub2 and lilo; grub2-mkconfig doesn't
rewrite the MBR every time that it's run... The difference between
grub1 and grub2 is that, if you use grub2-mkconfig, the entire
grub.cfg is regenerated whereas, if you just stick to grub.conf
(grub1)/grub.cfg (grub2) being updated by grubby, a newly-installed
kernel's boot stuff is added to the configuration file.

For grub1, there was an inconsistency because sda1 corresponded to
(hd0,0) so, for grub2, sda1 corresponds to (hd0,1).

For grub2, there's now an inconsistency because the disks are numbered
from 0 and the partitions from 1. Maybe we'll be kept on our toes with
another change for grub3 whereby sda1'll correspond to (hd1,1)...


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