[ipxe-devel] menu commands

[Robin Smidsrød]

On 30.03.2012 19:46, Oliver Rath wrote:
> Holy shit! This is great! Now its time to have a look for an award for
> this ..

I'm glad you're all happy about this new feature. I've been thinking
about it for a long time, but using echo/read/prompt always seemed like
such a poor man's choice.

After Michael mentioned to me about a week-and-a-half ago that the
scripting support in iPXE was getting so sophisticated that supporting a
menu system should be possible without too much effort I started
mentioning some of my thoughts. When I mentioned that using the TUI from
"config" should be usable, things started to get really interesting.
Unfortunately, that day I had a terrible headache, and I had to go and
sleep it off.

The fact is that I didn't sleep very well that night, because the design
of the menu feature kept moving around in my subconsciousness. Two days
later I had the opportunity to sit down and explain what I had in mind
to Michael, and things just "exploded" in productivity from there on.
The fact that I had a procedural design in mind (instead of reading and
parsing a file) made it possible to implement things with almost minimal
overhead to code size and complexity.

And as Michael mentioned, with the removal of COMBOOT support in the
default build (which was mostly used to invoke (vesa)menu.c32) the
overall code size is less than it was.

I would just like to thank Michael for some awesome work that was
implemented in such a short time I'm amazed it was even possible.

If someone needs a fully working example of an iPXE-native menu even
with sub-menu example, see here: https://gist.github.com/2234639

Congratulations everyone!

-- Robin