Re: Small suggestion: separators in menu

[Hari Narayanan]

My suggestion would be to leave Grub as is. The enhancement is purely
for appearance. Most of the users are used to seeing their menu choices
and can adapt easily. The usefulness comes in if you are constantly
rebooting with a variety of OSes. Grub is definitely a giant leap forward 
from Lilo. I am pretty happy with the way it is.

Hari


From: "Yoshinori K. Okuji" <address@hidden>
To: Klaus Reichl <address@hidden>
CC: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Small suggestion: separators in menu
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 02:18:27 +0900

At Mon, 22 Apr 2002 11:54:53 +0200 (MEST),
Klaus Reichl wrote:
> separator --solid          # drawing a line like top and bottom
> separator "Some Text"            # show "Some Text" like in title but
>                            # make it non-selectable

I'm not very concerned about the syntax. Rather, about the user
interface.

For example, suppose this:

TITLE1        <- this is the selected line
SEPARATOR1
TITLE2
SEPARATOR2
TITLE3

If the user pushes the down key, which line should the selected line
move to? "TITLE2" or "SEPARATOR1"? If any separators should be
skipped, it is possible that some lines can never be shown. For
example, suppose that the maximum number of lines is 4 and your menu
contains:

TITLE1
SEPARATOR1
SEPARATOR2
SEPARATOR3
SEPARATOR4
SEPARATOR5
SEPARATOR6
SEPARATOR7
TITLE2

Then you cannot see SEPARATOR4, never.

If you want to see SEPARATOR4, one solution would be that the cursor
moves line by line but you cannot "run" any separator (e.g. by the key
`b').

Another issue is whether GRUB should count separators as entries. For
example, in this menu:

TITLE1
SEPARATOR1
TITLE2

should TITLE2 be assigned to 1 or 2?

Anyway, the biggest issue is whether the cost-performance is good or
not. Clearly, adding this feature would make the implementation of
GRUB more complicated and possibly more buggy.

Okuji

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