[syslinux] Password protection

[H. Peter Anvin]

Tom Alsberg wrote:
> Hi there.
> 
> On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 11:47:50AM -0500, Michael K Ter Louw wrote:
> 
>>I realize that this is an honest request, but I find it interesting (and
>>slightly humorous) that a Computer Science dept. can't implement this
>>themselves in an _open source_ program like PXElinux.
> 
> 
> We can implement that ourselves, would probably not take a long time
> either, and that was what I was thinking of doing. But as with other
> projects (most recent example - Samba), we check if there is something
> like that under work (although as I see from the SYSLINUX code, that
> will not be too much work) at the moment, or whether it is planned. We
> don't want to change something that will be done by the developers in
> some way at close time. And we do, usually, if the change is not too
> specific to our environment, send patches of things we changed to the
> developers for inclusion in further releases (both for the good of
> users all over, and to save us from re-changing it in further
> releases).
> 
> So if there is no such work in progress, or plans, I'll probably do it
> myself... But I don't want two pieces of code that do the same job, so
> I first want to know.
> 
> If we'll implement it locally, then we'd love if the SYSLINUX team
> will accept a patch from us.
> 

The "SYSLINUX team", i.e. me, myself & I, do appreciate asking first.  I
reject a fairly large number of patches, because I'm still quite
concerned about SYSLINUX proper being useful for boot floppies.  I have
seriously been toying with expanding the role of COMBOOT images,
combined with some API, for a long time.  It has to be done with some
care, however; it's way too easy to freeze APIs that then are going to
hurt, and hurt, and hurt as they have to be maintained ad infinitum.  On
the other hand, modularity is good for a whole bunch of reasons.  I've
even considered moving the splash screen functionality into a separate
binary.  All in all I'm really more inclined as turning SYSLINUX into a
mini-DOS than into GRUB.

	-hpa