lilo vs grub

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, 2003-10-20 at 12:55, Janina Sajka wrote:
> > > grub needs to do the same w/o requiring manual intervention. Look in
> > > bugzilla for long bugs with lots of people subscribed to them who've
> > > found out the hard way that when you mirror on RH w/ grub and one
> > > disk dies, you will not boot until you hunt up a rescue disk and
> > > figure out how to reinstall grub.
> > 
> > Seems like a trivial enough fix, one could almost script it to call grub 
> > for mirror grub installs.  Has anybody RFE'd this to the upstream grub 
> > maintainers?
> And I suspect my list of eyes-free features is also trivial to
> implement--though I am not capable to do the coding.
> 
> Point is that grub needs an expanded set of user requirements. Was there
> evern such a process there? Or did some folks sit down to do what they
> thought a boot loader should do?

Open source works best when more people contribute to it. Certainly you
should discuss ideas for improvement with the authors/maintainers. I'm
not sure anyone brought up the fact that LILO has not (IIRC) been
actively maintained for at least a couple years now. In fact, I remember
the "lba32" directive that was so important several years ago was added
by an interested third party who was unable to contact the original
author/maintainer, and the results of his (the new guy's) work picked up
by most distros because it was so necessary to LILO's continued use.

GRUB is actively maintained and I would be surprised if its team wasn't
open to your suggestions and help. But to simply hope they're reading
this list probably isn't as effective as talking to them directly. You
might want to check out:
  http://www.gnu.org/directory/grub.html

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE