usability

["Yoshinori K. Okuji" <okuji@enbug.org>]

Hello,

I have stopped my work on GRUB 2 for a while, but I now would like to 
restart it again.

My initial goal is to make it possible to use GRUB 2 for real purpose 
(e.g. on my computer with which I write this mail). This is the most 
important for me, since it is really tiring to maintain both GRUB 
Legacy and GRUB 2. I don't think this will be feature-rich in near 
future, and I intend to focus on very fundamental things. I will do 
these as the first step:

- Implement the menu interface with Unicode awared. I have a prototype 
but this is very poor, especially about Unicode handling. I address 
this issue first.

- Support a config file. I can just port the support from GRUB Legacy, 
but I will consider if it could be improved. At least, I want to 
include support for including a portion of a config file from another 
file, and support for specifying a label to a title, so that you can 
use a label instead of a number to specify an entry.

- Implement some loaders on i386-pc for the normal mode (such as linux 
and multiboot). This should be very easy.

- Implement autoload. This should be very easy.

- Make it possible to call a hook when a variable is read/written. This 
would require some consideration about the API design.

- Implement some basic variables and commands (such as root and boot).

Probably I won't be very fast, because it is very hard for me to work in 
weekdays. If you are willing to work on any of them, let me know, so 
that we won't waste time due to duplicated work.

Okuji