New Boot Loader Menu

[Devin Teske]

On Oct 7, 2012, at 4:10 AM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:

> Devin Teske <devin.teske at fisglobal.com> writes:
>> What does everybody think?
> 
> I think it's a terrible idea.
> 
> What problem are you trying to solve, exactly?
> 

Many in-fact:

1. Growth issue. There's a ceiling to how many menu items a menu can have.

+ iX affiliates have come to me requesting accommodations for a submenu.

+ Adding said proposed submenu to the main menu (seen here: http://twitpic.com/b1pkll/full) would leave practically no room for any further additions.

2. Exploring that last statement ("no room for any further additions")…

+ Practical and technical limitations prevent us from having more than 9 menu items. Coding around this is non-trivial (it goes all the way down to the raw ASCII codes that are generated when an associative keycode is pressed).

+ Due to the aforementioned technical/practical limitations, there's little point in exploring the thought of: "what if we just got rid of Beastie to make more room for the menu". Yielding more screen real estate for the menu would not lift the technical limitations still limiting each menu from having at-maximum 9 items.

3. A bug is actually present in the current menu system.

+ Setting boot_verbose="YES" in loader.conf(5) and rebooting, the current menu system will not reflect this and the menu comes up saying "Verbose..... No". Although it is not and was not necessary to move the options to a submenu to fix this (in truth, the "dynamic menuitems" enhancement will fix that and does not require the use of submenus), it was easier for *me* to test the dynamic menuitem initialization (aka constructor call-back) feature enhancement if the option was in a submenu (since *re*-visiting a submenu is akin to rebooting had I not moved the items off the main menu).

+ gnn was the one that reported this bug to me in early September. That was a busy month because shortly thereafter, avg came at me with the request to accommodate submenus. I immediately recognized that these two requests (bugfix + enhancement) could be rolled into the same patchset (related features).
-- 
Devin

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