Re: Can LUA e coming with future Grub2

[Colin D Bennett <colin@gibibit.com>]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 09:08:13 +0800
"y.volta" <y.volta@gmail.com> wrote:

> hi,
> 
>     i get to know the Fancy menu branch has lua supported, and just
> wondering, the official release of Grub2 will have Lua inside ( as a
> mod )? 

It would be cool, to be sure!  I never used Lua before, and it was a
great experience integrating it into GRUB; Lua is very easy and clean
to integrate, and it makes adding totally customizable functionality to
themes really easy.

I haven't had a chance to really discuss the possibility of Lua support
with the core GRUB developers, however.

My plan was to modularize Lua in such a way that it is an optionally
loadable piece of the gfxmenu functionality.  Currently the Lua branch
has a hard dependency on Lua.

>     if so, i'm usre, it will extend grub2 much more: for it can load
> its function library and its scripts. Let's suppose we are trying
> develop a window GUI style menu system, just like the XOSL does, we
> can make this as a lua module, user can design its dialog or controls
> layout in its scripts and 'require ("gui.so");' to have modern window
> based menu UI. ;-)
> 
>     at the same time, we can also use lua to extend the grub.cfg,
> isn't it?

Actually, I think replacing GRUB's "bash-ish" scripting with Lua would
be great in many ways, but it is true that Lua (at ~100 KB) is larger
than the GRUB script engine.

Regards,
Colin