On Sun, Feb 01, 2015 at 11:56:40AM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:

[cut]

>
> > I believe that the way forward is simple: let's give standard,
> > rock-solid working environments to "home users", as that provided so
> > far by Debian & relatives, but leave the freedom to mess things up to
> > the people that know how to do that (or would like to learn it...).
>
> Abso-Lutely. As the OP, I never intended to suggest that Devuan should
> necessarily switch *the default* away from Grub2. I merely voiced the
> hope that LILO, ELILO, and the syslinux group would be available as
> packages. And I wholeheartedly agree with Hendrick that the process of
> busting back into a borked LILO machine, fixing lilo.conf, and
> re-liloing, should be documented.
>


OK, but then I don't see the problem. Currently, Debian Jessie makes
available LILO, ELILO, GRUB, GRUB2, syslinux (the whole suite,
including the bootloaders for xfs, btrfs and PXE), SILO, PALO,
petitboot, gummiboot, and who knows how many other boot loaders, and
Devuan will (at least initially) be an exact copy of Debian Jessie
without systemd installed by default. So those packages will still be
there, I suppose :)

I have to admit that I don't like grub2 either, and I still miss a bit
the old-fashioned LILO, syslinux, SBM and the like, but again: how
many users (and how often) do really care about which bootloader is
available or installed by default? I bet that 99.9% of the users of
Debian do not care, and maybe more than 85% of Devuan's ones will not
as well...

My point is that if you need to care about boot loaders (or
recompiling the kernel, or shrinking/extending a couple of
partitions), then you should know exactly what you are doing, or be
ready to accept the consequences, or refrain from doing anything :)

You might find it harsh, but I am convinced that most of the mess we
are forced to deal with nowadays (including the systemd nonsense and a
lot of other shit around) is due to a series of attempts to make
things "easy for the home user", under the assumption that the system
should act as a nanny and be able to deal with the ignorance, lack of
experience and laziness of the "home user", even for tasks that can
potentially hinder the functionality of the entire operating
system. That's why I get a bit nervous when anything is proposed "for
the good of the home user" :)

HND

KatolaZ

--
[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
[ me [at] katolaz.homeunix.net -- http://katolaz.homeunix.net -- ]
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