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Date:      Sun, 7 Oct 2012 10:51:37 -0700
From:      Devin Teske <devin.teske@fisglobal.com>
To:        =?iso-8859-1?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=F8rgrav?= <des@des.no>
Cc:        Devin Teske <dteske@freebsd.org>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: New Boot Loader Menu
Message-ID:  <3EB58454-7820-43C4-911E-7DEF2D02C880@fisglobal.com>
In-Reply-To: <86k3v21qsx.fsf@ds4.des.no>
References:  <0655B56F-AD43-402B-872C-568378E650F9@fisglobal.com> <86k3v21qsx.fsf@ds4.des.no>

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On Oct 7, 2012, at 4:10 AM, Dag-Erling Sm=F8rgrav wrote:

> Devin Teske <devin.teske@fisglobal.com> writes:
>> What does everybody think?
>=20
> I think it's a terrible idea.
>=20
> What problem are you trying to solve, exactly?
>=20

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")=85

+ Practical and technical limitations prevent us from having more than 9 me=
nu items. Coding around this is non-trivial (it goes all the way down to th=
e 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 hav=
ing at-maximum 9 items.

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

+ Setting boot_verbose=3D"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 s=
ubmenu 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 t=
est 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 t=
o accommodate submenus. I immediately recognized that these two requests (b=
ugfix + enhancement) could be rolled into the same patchset (related featur=
es).
--=20
Devin

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