Re: Summer of code: Fancy menu interface

[Vesa Jääskeläinen]

Alexandre Paz Mena wrote:
> Hi, I have  been working on a grub fork for a couple of months and now
> I'm quite familiar with its sources. Now, i would like to help
> developing a "fancy menu interface", so if anybody could give me some
> information about the current developing state of this feature I would
> be very thankful.

Let me borrow other e-mail I wrote recently to Jason Morganson. ;)

You two could co-operate on this one :). There are lot to do to improve it.

-snip-
You might have noticed that I said when someone makes the menu code
sentence there  :) . So basicly I haven't got time to do any GRUB
hacking for 5 months or so. There were some good discussions on how menu
system could be done on mailing list (MVC model). But basicly our ideas
has been that either you use text mode or graphics mode you can use the
same menu data. In text mode actual menu entries can be mapped to
predefined style, but on graphics mode other settings should be effective.

As you mentioned fonts that is one major thing that should be improved.
Problem with fonts is that if you have really big screen like 1080p
(Full-HD), the 8x8 or 16x8 pixel fonts are way too small to see. I think
there were some links on the wiki to freetype so please take a look at
it. I quickly take a look at it and there were lots of different drivers
for different systems. Another idea I had that there were some vector
library that also uses freetype, so that would be even more nicer
solution, but I think on that road we have a complete OS and that is not
what we want  :) . But starting with freetype port would be really nice.

About bitmap formats, I think I already committed TGA support (incl.
alpha support) to CVS. But basicly there would be later on need to have
support for PNG, JPEG, and then perhaps some X-windows specific formats.
With PNG we already have deflate coded by Okuji on the code base so that
could be reused. Also bitmap functionality should support of combining
two bitmaps (color + mask) to create bitmap with alpha information when
the format does not support it.

For now I have tried to make all code to be modularized. So if someone
doesn't need or want to have video code linked in I am not going to
force them. (There have been some mails about this to verifying it).

You asked about the order of things. I think improving glyph/font system
 would be really beneficial one so that one would be great. Secondly I
would either start with menu system or with PNG support. And thirdly
second step reversed  ;) . In current state you can basicly start with
menu system but then you just need to think how rest of things will
affect it.
-snip-

There might be couple of points not important for your query, but
basicly please study mailing list archives for discussions on the topic.
There has been some good posts about it. Otherwise I think state is what
we have in CVS. If there are still unanswered questions, please post to
this list so we can discuss it.

Thanks,
Vesa Jääskeläinen