On Sat, Jul 9, 2016, at 16:00, Brian wrote: > > All well and good but the installer inexplicably offers a choice between > GRUB and LILO. The installer manual is unhelpful on which to choose. A > newcomer wouldn't have a clue. We do them no service with this retrograde > offering. Get rid of it. > > What is the point of a choice? Just offer GRUB; it is the bootloader for > Debian and has many advantages over LILO in todayss Linux ecosystem. > People who have a great desire to use LILO can search it out. > > Unmaintained in Debian, The bit-rot starts here. >
I am not a member of the Debian installer team, and I am not authorized to speak for them. However, I will make the observation that LILO used to be the default boot loader, indeed the only boot loader at one point, in the Debian installer for i386/amd64. I suspect that LILO has been retained as an option in the Debian installer for that reason. The lilo package is maintained in Debian. It's maintainer is Joachim Wiedorn. He is also the upstream maintainer. He has ceased active development of lilo, but I believe he still accepts bug reports. And if he wants rid of it, I know a couple of people who are interested in taking it over, myself included. So I'm not concerned about it's maintenance status. As long as there are PCs with a BIOS, or a CSM, lilo will remain usable. If the BIOS/CSM goes, lilo goes with it. lilo can't function without a BIOS/CSM. But for UEFI-only systems, there's elilo as a grub alternative. Long live choice! -- .''`. Stephen Powell <zlinux...@fastmail.com> : :' : `. `'` `-
