[arch-dev-public] [signoff] grub-0.97-12

[Aaron Griffin]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:40 AM, Jan de Groot <jan at jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2008-03-18 at 11:22 -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:
>  > On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:09 AM, Jan de Groot <jan at jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
>  > >  Macbooks are i686 and x86_64 too. Do we want those people to install
>  > >  lilo because our old ancient version of grub that hasn't seen any
>  > >  development for years, doesn't support the partition table used on their
>  > >  machine?
>  > >  Or worse: do we want to push them to other distributions that do have a
>  > >  patched grub?
>  >
>  > Wait? I thought this was for support for partitions over 2 TB. How
>  > does it related to Macbooks?
>  >
>  > Also, in all seriousness, how is someone leaving "worse"? I didn't
>  > think we were jockeying for user membership? Has this changed?
>
>  Every intel mac comes with preformatted GPT disks. GPT is a new
>  partitioning scheme, just like EFI is a new BIOS standard. GPT is part
>  of the EFI standard, which happens to be implemented on every intel mac.
>
>  About someone leaving being bad:
>  this is not just about someone. This is about everyone who wants to
>  install arch on his or her mac and wants to use grub. If we start
>  reasoning like this, we could just close all bugs in flyspray with
>  "Won't fix" because we don't think users are important.

See, this is a little different. I see no where in either our bug
report or the gentoo bug report, a mention of Intel Macs. The only
information available is "it supports disks > 2TB", and nothing else

That information would have been important as all hell, but I keep
seeing us adding way too many patches to way too many things that have
been working for ages for reasons like "well, Gentoo did it". This
appears to be one of them. Patching something with a reason ("Support
for Intel Macs") is one thing, but I am positive that did not happen
here. It was patched because a user suggested it, and linked to a
patch gentoo had ("Everyone else does it, let's do it too").

It's just frustrating to see how our internal attitude has changed
this much. If we want to run with the "everyone else is doing it"
attitude, that's fine, but it seems like, at the very least, we need
to start changing slogans and things from "Keep it Simple, Stupid" to
"What Does Debian Do?" or something.