Re: [PATCH] Various menu related enhancements

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

I'm sorry that I'm very late to reply,

At Mon, 14 Oct 2002 16:48:35 +0200,
Adam Lackorzynski wrote:
> I have prepared several menu related patches which implement some (IMHO)
> useful features. Each feature is in its own patch and should work on its
> own. They will need to be applied one after another, though.

Thanks for your contribution. But I really don't want to bloat the
code size of GRUB any more unnecessarily, because GRUB has already
been quite large, and adding any more new features would make the
code much more spaghetti-like.

Thus, although I think new features you provided are all nice and I
want to add them into the next generation of GRUB (aka PUPA), I'd like
to make patches applied to GRUB minimum.

>  - 01_menu_vi_up_down.diff:
>    * Add vi like up and down in menu (j and k keys).

Why doesn't support for cursor keys satisfy you? As GRUB follows
GNU-style key bindings (i.e. Emacs and BASH), I don't think vi-like
key bindings would fit, anyway.

>  - 02_menu_reload.diff:
>    * Key 'r' for reload of the current menu. Useful when the config
>      comes via TFTP and is modified when the menu is already loaded.

Isn't this enough:

title Reload the menu
configfile (nd0)/tftpboot/menu.lst

>  - 03_menu_entry_display.diff:
>    * Display the number of the current entry in the top right corner of
>      the menu frame. It's useful to know which number to put in the
>      "Default" directive when the config menu is a longer than usual.

Because you need to use an OS to edit the menu file, I don't think
it would be so useful that GRUB itself shows such a number. On a
UNIX-like OS, you could do:

grep ^title /boot/grub/menu.lst | cat -n

or

ruby -e 'c=0;while gets;if /^title/;print c,"\t",$_;c+=1;end;end' \
  /boot/grub/menu.lst

>  - 04_menu_page_up_down.diff:
>    * Add page up and page down in the menu.

I'll apply this.

>  - 05_menu_go_on_with_right.diff:
>    * Make key right to do the same as enter in menu.

Ditto.

>  - 06_menu_history.diff:
>    * Add a history for the menu. Use key left to get to the previous
>      menu.

I wonder if this is so useful generally. This consumes precious memory
statically, and few people use nested menus. I think it would be
better to omit this feature, until we can use memory dynamically.

Thanks,
Okuji