On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 04:32:45AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> > > The author has updated their site to say:
> > >
> > > "NOTE: I will finish development of LILO at December 2015 because of
> > > some limitations (e.g. with BTFS, GPT, RAID). If someone want to
> > > develop this nice software further, please let me know ..."
> > >
> > > So I assume lilo has stopped development altogether from the last
> > > release, and we can look forward to only having the more complex
> > > grub2.
>
> And, honestly, this matter needs to be seen in proper perspective.
> Sometimes a piece of software is relatively simple and well enough
> debugged that it makes just as much sense to call it 'finished and
> stable' as it does 'unmaintained'.

LILO is anything but 'finished'. It's not 'stable', either -- even on
simple filesystems where it works, it dies horribly the moment any of blocks
the kernel was written on gets moved. Or, the first disk gets assigned a
different position. Only IDE guarantees the order of disks, which means you
can use LILO reliably only on truly museal hardware.

And on anything new or semi-new, you have EFI and thus GPT, meaning LILO is
outright worthless.

Even if you have an old machine and your BIOS allows forcing a specific
ordering of disks, say goodbye to LILO unless your setup is really simple.
Ie, no RAID, no btrfs, no zfs, no fsfs, no fancier options of xfs. No
encryption of any kind. No LVM.

> Another example is procmail.

Unlike LILO, I fully agree with you about procmail. It follows stable Unix
specification, and is mature.

--
An imaginary friend squared is a real enemy.