Re: Idea: Use extended blocklist format to support installing to raid device.

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 05:20:54PM +0800, Bean wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Right, but we can't get rid of it totally. For example, if they don't
> reserve enough space at the beginning of disk, there is no way to
> install grub2 without blocklist. And, some people may want to install
> to partition instead of mbr. blocklist is useful in small media as
> well, like floppy, which don't the luxury of mbr.

My point is that users shouldn't provide this kind of insane setups and
expect GRUB to work well in them.  Instead of jumping through hoops in order
to support them no matter what, I find it perfectly reasonable that we refuse
to do it.

To me, this sounds like a slippery slope.  Users come requesting support for
all sort of weird setups all the time (I remember a recent thread from someone
who wanted to boot right away from LVM without partition table).  GRUB is
free software, so everyone can adjust it to their needs, but when we implement
the code to support one of these setups, we're basically promising to support
it in the future, deal with user problems and bug fixes.  This shouldn't be
treated lightly IMHO.

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."