Thank you for your answer!
xenos1 wrote:
That said, I am not sure if your concern has any basis in reality as the name "osdev" is not trademarked, is it?
Of course not, if it were, then I wasn't asking nicely, instead you would face with an armada of angry lawyers
But since OSDev is just a community, I'd like to ask you to be understanding and please do not to use the name.
xenos1 wrote:
Limine does not aspire towards feature parity with BOOTBOOT
That was never a question. Please leave out BOOTBOOT from this conversation, that has nothing to do why I created this post. The point is, we have lots and lots and lots of boot loaders that aims at x86 only and can boot only from disks. There's absolutely no problem with that. But those that have a wiki page too, has something more to offer in the hope that they will be useful to the wiki readers. For example,
babystep is the bare minimum;
Bootf demonstrates how to load a higher-half kernel among other things;
BootProg is interesting because it parses MZ executables (not discussed on the wiki otherwise);
Gujin also supports CDROMs etc. etc. etc. As you can see they all have a feature that others don't, which makes them good examples. I'm pretty sure Limine also has some features that makes it unique, so I think it should have it's own wiki page, no question about that. FYI the wiki page wasn't removed, only the links (many of them I'd like to see put back as soon as you have a 1.0 stable release)
xenos1 wrote:
rather it is something which stems from a need I had myself
Exactly, and those needs are very similar to other bootloaders, and specific to your kernel. Please don't get this wrong, I do not want to belittle your loader in any way. (I think a boot loader shouldn't be featureful, I think it should do one thing and one thing only, but do that good. That's also why I don't like GRUB, it's too bloated and more like an OS than a loader to my taste)
xenos1 wrote:
it also happens to be the need of many other people that have decided to try it for their projects (including the fairly major skiftOS and managarm).
Which is really an achivement. Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not against having a wiki page for Limine. I'm not against having links to that page on the wiki once it gets a stable release, just please do not put it everywhere. It would be the best if it were linked on the pages that are unique features to it. For example if Limine can boot from an ext
4 partitions, which other loader's can't do (they usually only support ext
2), then I think the "ext4" wiki page should have a link to Limine, because it is a good example which we don't have yet.
xenos1 wrote:
Plus we natively support ext2/3/4 which as far as I can tell BOOTBOOT does not. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Actually BOOTBOOT can boot from any file system (ext family included). But the point is, it is not a main feature (because ESP needs to be FAT anyway) plus many loaders can boot from ext2, therefore on the "ext2" page you won't find any BOOTBOOT link.
Similarly, although BOOTBOOT supports Multiboot, it is not its main feature, therefore there's no link to it on the Multiboot page (because people looking for Multiboot are probably more interested in GRUB). But for example booting from unknown file system is one of its main features, therefore there's a link on the Rolling Your Own File System page (because people wanting to write their own file system might be interested in a loader that can boot from their fs) Does this make sense to you?
xenos1 wrote:
With the above said, I naively thought it would be in the best interest of this Wiki's readers to be given more choice, and since i saw BOOTBOOT's "what links here" page mentioning it around, I thought that would be something equally fine for me to do, at least anywhere BOOTBOOT was also mentioned
There's nothing wrong with the first one, but there's a problem with the second one. Limine has different features than BOOTBOOT, so it is confusing and makes no sense to place links on the same pages.
For example, when Limine gets a stable release, I really would like to see a link to the Limine page on the GPT wiki page for example. But when there's no CDROM support in Limine, I don't think linking to it on the booting from CDROM page makes sense. You know what I mean?
xenos1 wrote:
I had not seen any requirement of maturity of a project for it to be mentioned
Here is one now
Actually that's the main reason for this thread, to regulate this somehow. Don't take this personal, it's just we have way too many x86 and disk only boot loaders around. You were just unlucky that this popped up at your loader, that's all.
xenos1 wrote:
It was always intended as a KISS BIOS bootloader supporting the stivale protocol (which is implemented by other bootloaders for a variety of platforms such as UEFI and even ARM).
Which makes is a perfect example, and therefore Limine should be linked from the "stivale" wiki page as an example implementation.
xenos1 wrote:
I will add Limine back to the wiki, in the future, once a 1.0 is released
Perfect! And please put links only on the relevant feature pages. Just for the records, even in its current state Limine looks promising, and its wiki page was never removed. Only the links were (and only until it has a 1.0 release).
xenos1 wrote:
perhaps once I make that Limine article no longer a glorified stub :p
I don't think that's necessary, however preferable. I'm really looking forward for a more detailed wiki page! I hope we can remove the "stub" warning soon!
Cheers,
bzt