Re: vesafb terminal for testing.

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Monday 15 August 2005 18:06, Vladimir Serbinenko wrote:
> We don't need to make the whole thing absolutely skinnable (just the
> basic skins)
> if we make like I proposed (menus like terminals, in modules) because if
> someone wants to
> change completely the look he can just write a new menu module.

A pluggable menu might sound good, but it's not so easy to maintain multiple 
menu interfaces. Ideally, we want to have a single implementation which 
accepts many parameters. I think it would end up with a kind of stylesheet 
like CSS in HTML.

> > -mouse handling (??)
>
> It must not be difficult: we can just port mouse.com from FreeDos or use
> any other
> mouse implementation.

It is actually difficult, because USB mouse support requires interferences 
with other USB devices. Most modern BIOSes support USB legacy interfaces, 
such as USB disks and keyboards. It is not easy not to affect them.

> Now the most important
> questions is how
> to make the *general/basic* things to ensure the maximum flexibility in
> the future as
> Yoshinori K. Okuji said in about 6 months we have to block them: don't
> change them anymore.

Don't take my argument too strictly. It can be in 6 months, in 3 months or in 
12 months. In principle, I do not want to feature-freeze GRUB 2 until we are 
satisfied enough with the design. This opportunity -- redesigning everything 
-- is really hard to obtain. Note that I had to wait for 3 years to start 
GRUB 2. So I wouldn't stop thinking how to improve GRUB very soon.

Also, as long as changes do not affect compatibility, we can add more features 
later. Indeed, I have implemented a number of new features even in GRUB 
Legacy without losing any bit of compatibility (Do you know that 0.97 is 
completely backward-compatible with 0.4?). It was quite hard sometimes but 
feasible.

Anyway, I expect that we will not have to wait too long to see what we want to 
do with a fancy menu, since Vesa is very fast to implement the code. 
Hopefully, we will see the first working version in this month or next month. 
Once it starts working, the discussion will be much easier.

Okuji