Gentlemen, I just subscribed to this bug log as an interested party. Allow me to put in my two cents worth, if I may.
(1) On behalf of Debian's lilo users, of which I am one, please do not remove lilo from the distribution. I used lilo for many years. When the default boot loader changed to grub version 1, I went with grub version 1. But when grub version 2 became the default with Squeeze, it wouldn't work for me. I switched back to lilo, and I have been using it ever since. And lots of other users use it too. It has a very loyal following. (2) William Pitcock is obviously a very smart man and a very capable maintainer; and I have nothing personal against him; but by making public statements such as "lilo has no future", "let the damn thing die already", "nobody cares what you want", and other similar comments, he has, in my humble opinion, disqualified himself as a legitimate candidate for lilo's maintainer, regardless of how great his technical skills may be. A maintainer should nourish and cherish his package, not try to kill it off. Putting William in charge of lilo is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. The fox does not have the hens' best interests at heart. I am currently using Joachim's lilo 23.0 on my Dell OptiPlex GX400, and it works flawlessly for me. That's not to say that it has no bugs: it probably does. But to say that it has no merit is going too far. I also have an old Pentium II machine, as William does. I'm going to try out lilo 23.0 there next. I also am volunteering to help out, whether in an official capacity or an unofficial capacity I really don't care. lilo's recent problems are mostly due to a change made to the official Debian stock kernel image package maintainer scripts for Lenny, which essentially broke the support for lilo, although no-one realized it at the time. (See Debian bug number 505609.) Everyone assumed that lilo's map installer was being run following a kernel upgrade, but it wasn't. Everyone assumed that lilo had some kind of fatal flaw. But it wasn't lilo's fault. I am the one who found the cause of that problem. It has been fixed now in the latest stable point release (5.0.5); but for Squeeze, the kernel people would not reinstate the kernel maintainer scripts' historic support for lilo. Hook scripts are now required to make lilo work properly under Squeeze, and /etc/kernel-img.conf must also be set up properly. Those trying to migrate to lilo from grub will have trouble if they don't set up the environment properly. See my unofficial custom kernel-building web page, http://www.wowway.com/~zlinuxman/Kernel.htm, under "Step 10: Customizing the kernel installation environment", for more details. Joachim may be a little green, but he wants to see lilo succeed. And that is the most important qualification, in my opinion. Respectfully submitted. -- .''`. Stephen Powell : :' : `. `'` `- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
