On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 23:51 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 05:23:48PM -0700, Mike Bird wrote:
> > So we have a package that is essential in some circumstances, that costs
> > next to nothing to maintain, and that takes up <0.1% of a CD's space.
>
> 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.
>
> *That's* what makes the developers want to drop it -- it's not just to make
> your life hard.
And even if all that is present, the model behind lilo is unreliable,
and has always caused major problems. When we shipped lilo by default,
the various incarnations of "LI", "L 01 01 01...", etc were a *major*
support issue, because reinstalling the first stage bootloader is very
failure prone.
--
Peter