Re: usability

[Marco Gerards]

"Yoshinori K. Okuji" <address@hidden> writes:

> I have stopped my work on GRUB 2 for a while, but I now would like to 
> restart it again.

Nice!  Welcome back!

> My initial goal is to make it possible to use GRUB 2 for real purpose 
> (e.g. on my computer with which I write this mail). This is the most 
> important for me, since it is really tiring to maintain both GRUB 
> Legacy and GRUB 2. I don't think this will be feature-rich in near 
> future, and I intend to focus on very fundamental things. I will do 
> these as the first step:

This is very important.  The sooner people can use GRUB 2, the sooner
we can expect patches, testers, etc.

> - Implement the menu interface with Unicode awared. I have a prototype 
> but this is very poor, especially about Unicode handling. I address 
> this issue first.

Could you please inform us what that means for other parts of GRUB 2?
Especially the console and filesystems.  If special care should be
taken, I can already keep the issues in mind.

If selecting a menu item is not a noop anymore it can be used already
to boot.  I can implement this, if you want me to.

> - Support a config file. I can just port the support from GRUB Legacy, 
> but I will consider if it could be improved. At least, I want to 
> include support for including a portion of a config file from another 
> file, and support for specifying a label to a title, so that you can 
> use a label instead of a number to specify an entry.

I think including config files is an important feature.  

> - Implement some loaders on i386-pc for the normal mode (such as linux 
> and multiboot). This should be very easy.

I can commit Thomas' patch for the chainloader.  I could do the other
two as well, if you don't want to.

> - Implement autoload. This should be very easy.

autoload?  Is this the thing we discussed to automatically load
commands?

> - Make it possible to call a hook when a variable is read/written. This 
> would require some consideration about the API design.

We discussed this a long time ago and it is already implemented.
Perhaps you have forgotten about this.  But just have a look at
env.[ch] or ask me when it is not clear.

> - Implement some basic variables and commands (such as root and boot).

Done already.  You told me `root' should not be a command, but a
variable.  Boot is implemented already.  This went into CVS together
with the variable stuff.

It seems that you can't remember all things we discussed and that I
have changed.  If there is something not clear, please ask me.  It
would be a waste of time if you would implement things that are there
already, etc.

> Probably I won't be very fast, because it is very hard for me to work in 
> weekdays. If you are willing to work on any of them, let me know, so 
> that we won't waste time due to duplicated work.

Just see what I just said.  Other than that I will focus on making the
PPC port functional and adding filesystems.

As you might have noticed I am not that active all the time.  I have
several projects I work on and to prevent myself from being bored I
switch projects weekly.

What would be useful is extending the TODO if you feel important
things are missing.  GRUB 2 is quite an active project (people already
know it and are willing to work on it) and chances are high people
want to work on things you put in the TODO.  Especially when it is
networking related, from what I have noticed people want to work on it
but don't really know what to do.

Thanks,
Marco