Re: [RFC] Redesign of the menu system

[Michal Suchanek]

2009/8/19 Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko <address@hidden>:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Bean<address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Currently, the menu system is a little unorganized and difficult to
>> extend. My goal of the redesign are:
>>
>> Modular
>> Split code into small modules, each module implement a specific
>> function, modules uses predefined interface to call each other.
> I'm ok with using predefined interfaces but splitting between .mods
> may be not beneficial since normal.mod isn't size-critical. But I'm ok
> with just compiling code-independent parts into the same module
>>
>> Extensible
>> The core of the menu system is components, which can be extended
>> easily. Components can be written in C or lua.
>>
>> Configurable
>> The menu system can be configured easily by end users. The layout of
>> screen can be configured with xml file, while the window styles is
>> configured with css file. Interface are exported to C and lua so that
>> you can configure the menu system dynamically.
> I don't like the idea of xml or css. For xnu device tree I designed my
> own format but then I saw that the whole idea of loading file for
> configuring grub behaviour is fundamentally flawed. Environment
> variables are already present, modifiable from shell and easy to use.
> To have level or tree-like model you can use '.' as a name separator
> it will make the system uniform with current FreeBSD booting.

XML/CSS is not the easiest format to work with but a bunch of
variables which represent a tree is not nice either.

However, apt has settings format that allows to specify variables both
separately and as trees (using {} nested blocks).

Something like that would probably make the life easier - you do not
have to write the branch names again and again if you add several
variables to the same branch but you can set a single variable deep
inside the tree easily.

Thanks

Michal