[arch-general] syslinux: out of date - or not?

[Eli Schwartz]

On 12/21/18 6:34 AM, Bjoern Franke wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I recently wanted to switch from grub to syslinux, but it could not boot
> my /boot-partition, because it uses XFS.
> 
> Unfortunately only syslinux 6.04 supports XFS, while we stick on 6.03.
> 6.04 is somehow a "testing" version, thought it has been out for 2
> years, so I marked 6.03 as "out of date".
> 
> I'm wondering a bit why we stick on 6.03, even Debian stable[1] has 6.04.
> 
> BR
> Bjoern
> 
> [1]https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=803938

The fact that Debian ships an unreleased version syslinux (because
according to your bug report link, a person who wanted to use XFS
managed to become the Debian maintainer and upload a prerelease out of
personal motivations) is not, in fact, proof positive that Arch should
do the same.

However, as it happens Arch *does* have syslinux available... in the
testing repos. So ultimately we are not sticking on 6.03 (even though
there are at least as many convincing arguments to be made that we
should, as there are arguments that we should ship a prerelease).

Why is it still in testing? That's another matter entirely. The answer
is that it doesn't boot. Actually that is one of two different issues
with attempting to build syslinux on newer compiler toolchains, and
Debian has patches for both -- neither of which the syslinux developer
community has responded to, though given that they've only committed 2
patches in the last year, both of which were in response to a syslinux
thread entitled "Is syslinux still worked on? No new commits in git for
about one year", things are looking... gloomy.

Of the two patches needed in order to *build* syslinux, only one, needed
to successfully run makepkg, has been responded to on the mailing list,
and that only very recently:
https://www.syslinux.org/archives/2018-November/026229.html
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/60405

"Thanks.  Merged but not yet pushed."

No clue what that is supposed to mean, it does come with bizarre
rationalizations though.

We do include this patch in our brand-new testing/syslinux package.

Unfortunately the other build issue manifests as silently succeeding to
build, but failing to work when attempting to boot your system:
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/61059
And this patch has not, as far as we can tell, been looked at by the
developers. But I guess it does work for Debian.

tl;dr

While I understand it's disappointing to not have desired features from
the package, it does take some time to get those features when they
suffer from being both unreleased code, and code on top of a package
that doesn't validly build in 2018. Please wait, we are trying to get to
a working state, and hopefully our syslinux maintainer will be able to
resolve this sometime soon. Once we can trust the package actually
works, we can move it to stable.

Hope this clears things up for you. :)
Good luck.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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