Adding ability to display description text for menuentry items

[Rescue Zilla]

Hi,

The GRUB2 currently does not provide any mechanism to display a description paragraph for the menuentry item the user has highlighted.

The SYSLINUX project already has this very useful feature, but I switched from ISOLINUX as GRUB2 is otherwise more powerful, far better maintained and crucially has better support for Secure Boot. Please view the following 5 second animated GIF that I created as a demonstration of the feature I'm proposing: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1414379/83353723-b925be80-a393-11ea-8f52-24e3a066788b.gif.

Currently with GRUB2 any explanatory text associated with a menuentry needs to be either placed within the menuitem title or in a separate manual.

Being able to display descriptions is very important for custom distributions, especially those aimed at newbie users.

I can produce a patchset for further discussion. One solution is to ensure:

• GRUB menuentry items allows specifying the description text
• GRUB theme file allows position/size/font to display help text

An alternative solution is to ensure:

• GRUB allows registering callback function (this may be difficult)
• GRUB allows referencing theme objects using the 'id' field, to enable/disable visibility

What do you all think?

If you guys are happy with the first solution, I will implement it.

Regards,

Shasheen Ediriweera

Developer of Rescuezilla