revisiting tunables under Safe Mode menu option

[Andriy Gapon]

on 01/03/2012 18:52 Devin Teske said the following:
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Andriy Gapon [mailto:avg at FreeBSD.org]
>> Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2012 12:39 AM
>> To: Devin Teske
>> Cc: John Baldwin; freebsd-current at FreeBSD.org; Scott Long; Devin Teske
>> Subject: Re: revisiting tunables under Safe Mode menu option
>>
>> on 01/03/2012 03:34 Devin Teske said the following:
>>>
>>> +1 on keeping the menu items loosely entwined (ACPI stands alone, but Safe
>>> Mode knows about ACPI but only acts on it when being enabled).
>>
>> Can you explain why?
>> +1 for having both menu items and each doing its own thing without any
>> entanglement :-)
>>
> 
> First, I realize that this may sound entirely *dumb*, but here-goes:
> 
> In transitioning from an old release (sans-menu; 4.11 for example) to a newer
> release (with menu; 6.x for example), one of the first thing that is noticed is
> "Safe Mode".
> 
> I know that when I first saw this, I scratched my head and wondered what it did
> and what it might be useful for. To this day, I still have never used it.
> 
> When I created the new menu for 9.x/higher, I had to rewrite that portion of the
> code and eventually learned what Safe Mode does when used. Still can't say that
> I've ever used it, however, at the point that I saw that it disabled ACPI among
> other things, that it is more of a blanket option for anything and everything
> that might be useful if/when you're having problems (*cough* still can't say
> that I've ever used it, as when I have problems I'm usually slogging through the
> kernel code, not relying on safe mode to fix some problem).
> 
> That being said, I felt that it was a huge improvement to the UI to have the
> Safe Mode option divulge a little bit of its secret by visibly diddling the ACPI
> menu item (giving a clue to people that *haven't* read the code that this option
> is indeed not independent but instead conglomerate in-nature).
> 
> Indeed, I've watched field engineers when exploring the menu options and their
> eyes light-up when they see that "Safe Mode" toggles ACPI off when enabled.
> Extrapolating on their surprise, they appear to have an "Aha!"-moment as
> previously... this field engineer had no idea what on God's green Earth what
> "Safe Mode" did (or didn't) as he didn't know about "kenv" and certainly
> couldn't read "Forth". At that point, he may not have had a full understanding
> of all the options that Safe Mode  diddled, but at that point he at least knew
> that Safe Mode is a multi-option that does many things -- which is more than
> 6.x, 7.x, or 8.x ever offered which simply boots immediately the Safe Mode
> option is selected and does nothing to explain what it is that Safe Mode is
> doing (which would in-turn properly calibrate the user's expectations).
> 
> Making the menu items completely independent would be take away the (however
> slight) above value-add that was brought in by entwining these two menu-items.
> I'm not saying that this would be a grave travesty, but would in-fact be a
> value-loss.

Devin,

you did a great job with boot menu enhancement in general and in this area in
particular.  You greatly improved usability while preserving the historic behavior
and put a lot of work and creativity into that.  Thank you!

But the argument is that the historic behavior is no longer useful.  I see that
removing the historic behavior also kills a little bit of your code (and a little
bit of magic).  That's true, that's a loss in the code.

But I still believe that it would be an improvement from the point of view of
usability end-users.

Having a whole sub-menu where multiple parameters could be tweaked individually
would be even greater improvement.  But that's not as easy to do.

-- 
Andriy Gapon