Re: vesafb terminal for testing.

[Marco Gerards]

"Yoshinori K. Okuji" <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.

It would be nice if GUI's can be distributed as plugins...

Isn't XML often used to describe interfaces?  Perhaps we can use a
structured form of storing data like XML...  But that is just a random
thought. :-)

>> > -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.

It's not easy on the PC.  But AFAIK it should be easy with EFI and
IEEE 1275, but I have not taken a close look yet.

>> 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.

Right.

> 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.

Right, but it would be the best if we think now and design the
interfaces.  We don't need to implement it all and it does not have to
be perfect, it is important to have a good foundation we can build on.

> 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.

Agreed.

Thanks,
Marco