: As long as Lilo can still be installed on the extended partition I'll
: be satisfied.
Good. So either adapting the kernel or LILO would work.
The easiest change that seems to satisfy everybody (perhaps
except for myself) is to follow Ted's suggestion and make
the length 1 block.
: BTW, if the Lilo installer is now responsible for reading the partition
: table to figure out what "hda5" means,
Don't worry. There is no good software that uses the naming.
The kernel, or fdisk, are quite willing to have it called
/devices/disks/IDE/a/5.
When I talk about hda5, that is only shorthand for: the device with
major 3 and minor 5.
[In fact newbies are often confused, and say: the kernel recognized
/dev/hdc, while it only printed "hdc", a disk designation, for a device
with major 22 and minor 0, not the filename of a block special file,
that exists on their system but has a different major number.]
: Also, while you are considering changes to Lilo, how about preventing it
: from being installed on the boot sector of an MSDOS file system? Quite
: a few people get badly hurt by that mistake, too.
I will never consider making any changes to Lilo unless Werner says
that he thinks it a good idea. But I got the impression that he
preferred the present stability - the "don't fix it when it is not
broken" point of view. He may well be right.