Re: [ros-dev] Usetup

[Love Nystrom]

Hi,

What You say makes sense of course.
I can't find time to dig into the code, but it sounds like you acted 
correctly.

We can of course improve the setup behavior as time goes and we learn how
to do it right with various boot managers, no need to take after 
Microsoft here,
but there will always be cases when we don't know how to wedge the boot in.

We can always, as long as there is a free partition or free space to 
create one, get as far
as installing the OS and it's partition boot, but may be unable to 
install a master boot,
if the user has an unknown boot manager we don't recognize

One way to deal with it would be to chain the master boot.

That is, we save the original master boot to a file, and implement a query
in our own master boot, whether the user want to boot ROS, or continue
with the original master boot. It would be a small matter to load the 
original
master boot and giving control over to it if need be.

Sure, it's one more pit-stop on the way to OS, but it would take care
of all the cases we cannot know, or cannot handle.

Best Regards
  L from Hell

Eric Kohl <eric.kohl(a)t-online.de> wrote:
>   Hi!
>
>  Being cooperative was my intention when I wrote this part of usetup. 
>  The bad thing about this approach is that usetup needs to deal with 
>  all kinds of different situations that developers cannot even think 
>  about. The only proper way to fix this situation was: "Don't touch it 
>  if you don't know how to deal with it!" The result was that usetup 
>  could only handle empty harddisks and Windows boot managers correctly. 
>  Except for these two cases there are lots of different situations that 
>  a setup application cannot deal with. That's where the user must fix 
>  things. That's why usetup enables users to save the bootsector to a 
>  floppy disk.  This enables them to fix the unknown situations 
>  themselves. Unfortunately this means that newbies might not be able to 
>  install the bootcode properly. But I thought it was better not to 
>  overwrite a bootsector that to unintentionally damage a system.
>
>  The question how to handle this correctly is a difficult one. 
>  Microsoft chose the easy way as they behave like they are the owner of 
>  the system and overwrite everything as they see fit. But implementing 
>  this part of the setup in a way that fits everyones needs is a very 
>  difficult task. Just think about the different filesystems and 
>  different versions of LILO and GRUB and what about other third-party 
>  boot-managers...
>
>  Regards,
>  Eric