[syslinux] Module Versioning

[BALATON Zoltan]

On Mon, 7 Mar 2016, Pete Batard via Syslinux wrote:
> On 2016.03.07 17:55, Ferenc Wágner wrote:
>> Why not install instead an arbitrary version of Syslinux and replace all
>> .c32 files with the modules of the installed version?
>
> I mentioned that in my previous mail. But I reckon it was easy to miss 
> as that mail was rather long:
>
>
> "One solution to avoid that would be to embed in Rufus all possible .c32 
> modules from Syslinux, alongside with the 'ldlinux.sys' version we have, 
> and replace them on the USB. This is not very realistic however (the 
> application size would explode, and as more version of Syslinux get 
> releases, we'd have more modules to embed)"
>
>
> One thing you may not realize is that Rufus is less than 1MB in size, 
> and I'd rather keep it that way (for various reason, one being the 
> bandwidth costs associated with circa 2M downloads/month) and that the 
> Syslinux files are only one of the various binaries I have to embed in 
> it (there's also some FreeDOS, GRUB and Grub4DOS binaries, a FAT12 
> UEFI:NTFS image as well as and other stuff).

What I don't get is why do you have to rebuild the boot loader in the 
first place. Most of these isos (including the Tails one) are hybrid which 
should work if you just dd/rawrite it on the USB drive. Rufus seems to do 
something much more complicated than this, risking breaking the boot 
loader of the iso while rebuilding it. If the iso already supports booting 
from USB no rebuilding should be needed, if it does not changing it 
automatically for something it was not intended to do could either work if 
you're lucky or fail if you're not.

Regards,
BALATON Zoltan