Re: boot menu

At 11:45 AM -0700 11/30/04, Scott Long wrote:
>Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>>
>>I personally wouldn't mind having the menu there by default, but
>>some people have mentioned an issue with the clear-screen in it,
>>or that a larger menu slows down booting on a serial console.
>>I'm just trying to suggest ideas which should avoid those issues,
>>but will still provide a menu for the novice/casual FreeBSD user.
>>
>>But at this point I think I've made enough suggestions, so I'm
>>waiting to see what others think we should do.
>
>So I gave 4 options in another email, but haven't seen any real
>response to those yet.

Hmm.  I do not remember seeing that email, and I can't find it in
any of my mailboxes or my trash.  I did get the message from Michael
saying that the discussion should be moved to freebsd-current, but
until this message I haven't seen the discussion pop up here.

>For a refresher:
>
>1) 'Classic'.  Just as it is in 5-STABLE
>2) 'Enhanced'. Compound menus, switchable logo or no logo,
>    [Space] re-assigned to Exit.  On-line help.  Maybe even
>    smart enough to save its own configuration settings.
>3) 'Minimal'.  No frames, logos, timers, etc.  Just the menu
>    options.  Possibly auto-selected if it detects that its on
>    the comconsole.  Not sure how this would work for sparc64
>    and alpha, though.
>4) 'None'. No menu at all.
>
>The plan would be to have these 4 options be selectable in
>6-CURRENT.  The default would be 'Enhanced'.

Seems to me I should have some strong opinion on this, but my
main desire is just that *some* helpful menu is available for
the novice/casual FreeBSD user.

On the minor nitpicking front, I would think that if you have
multiple options (like the above), the key sequences would be
mostly the same between the options.  This implies that the
'classic' menu would also have [space] re-assigned to exit for
option #1.  And to keep things friendly for novice/casual users,
I think that "exit" would include writing out a single-line that
tells the user how to get back into the menus.  That way, if
someone hit space by mistake, they will have a pointer on how to
get back to where they were.

It does seem like a bunch of extra work to have three different sets
of menus, and then have an option to select which menus to use for
selecting options.  Now that I (finally) have serial consoles on
most of my FreeBSD machines, I kinda like the idea of always
coming up in a very minimal prompt (more like 4.x), and then
having a single boot-loader command which would fire up the
helpful menus.  Preferably the 'enhanced' menus from your proposal.

But if you're willing to do the extra work, I can certainly live
with the result...

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad_at_gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad_at_freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih_at_rpi.edu