Package: tech-ctte Severity: normal Hello,
Since six weeks I see a very problematic situation of LILO maintaining and I don't know how this problem could be solved. Since the initial mail from William Pitcock, the LILO maintainer (2010-05-22): http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00769.html it started a discussion about the removing of LILO. Because of many statements of William it seems he don't want to do anymore for the lilo package in Debian. One central reason is: there is no upstream for years. On the other side there are many users (popcon = 2596) who still want to use lilo. And the second side is: grub2 is still very beta. Some mails to debian-devel say: grub2 is far away from stable and for using in productive systems! Because of this situation I have decided to overtake the development of LILO and offer an upstream for Debian (2010-06-06 and 2010-06-19): http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00117.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00399.html The reaction of William about my announcement was not in the way who I have thought. It seems he still wants to remove lilo from Debian. With the mail from William (2010-06-07) and the following thread: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00137.html it seems William doesn't believe to lilo anymore. In this thread he was asked to orphan the lilo package. But no answer came from the maintainer. In the following time I have asked William Pitcock (and the second maintainer Matt Arnold) to orphan the package because it is apparent they don't want to maintain the package anymore. I have asked twice: public on debian-devel and also private. But it seems they don't be interested in surrendering the maintaining of the package. On the other side how I can analyse about the QA site of lilo and the bug reports the recent maintainer seems to be nearly inactive since many months. In some other mails it seems the favorit for William (and also Matt Arnold) is now extlinux. O.K. this is a private preference, but I think on Debian it is normal to have more solutions for the same thing (here: bootloader). So I see no reason to remove the lilo package. In the last two weeks there were other discussions on debian-devel about bootloader to prepare for squeeze to make it working with new kernels and the new way of updateing kernel + initrd: Many informations about newer requirements to bootloader: http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2010/06/msg01011.html New informations about updated package initramfs-tools: http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2010/06/msg01063.html This evolution must be go into lilo, too. But this need a very active maintaining of this package, which I don't see. Now I see the danger, that lilo still "slip" into the next stable (squeeze) but can not be used productive in the next stable because of lack of the right scripts. Because lilo is a very good software and is still need by many users, I think the lilo package in Debian merit an active maintaining. It should not be blocked of maintaining. Please appeal to the recent maintainer to orphan the lilo package. Then other people who still use and want lilo can overtake the maintaining. Or is there another solution? Have a nice day, Joachim (Germany)
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