Re: My Wishlist and strategic thinking for v2.4

["Thomas Womack" <thomas.womack@merton.oxford.ac.uk>]

>If something terrible happens, we print a message. We'd think the
>user is a moron if the kernel said "root fs has no superblock"
>and they ignored it. Because of this, the user feels that they
>are being forced to understand all the strange messages.
>
>Also, messages are normally printed when something bad happens.
>Users to not expect "I'm not dead yet!" messages. They expect
>a progress indicator instead, When the user sees a message that
>they don't understand, they (reasonably) assume it is an error.

I've just had a look through /var/log/dmesg, and I can't see a message that's
really worth displaying (of course, this is a well-configured PC).

Isn't the correct solution to have a configure option CONF_LONG_BOOTUP_MESSAGES,
and a LILO option 'verbose'; if the machine hangs on bootup, tech support tells
the user to reboot and type 'verbose' at the LILO prompt, and then has the
messages to work from?

Tom

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