Re: Idea: elimination of the normal mode

["Vesa Jääskeläinen" <chaac@nic.fi>]

Bean wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 2:10 AM, Vesa Jääskeläinen <chaac@nic.fi> wrote:
>> It has anything what core provides. If by this you get core smaller then I
>> am all for it. If it makes it larger then I would propose to find free space
>> from somewhere else. Core.img just have to be standalone application so user
>> can do recovery if something gets wrong in installation or something else.
>>
>> I do not know how well grub scripting is integrated to normal mode so check
>> that out first.
> 
> With my suggestion, core.img would contain:
> 
> minicmd + basic console interface + line scanner + fs modules
> 
> It would be slightly bigger because we also add the option analyzer.
> But it may also reduce size due to better function separation.

It total size is smaller I do not care. If not, then I would pass it. I 
still like the idea to separate rescue mode from "normal" shell mode. 
This gives user an idea that grub has failed to load more of itself.

I think Robert has from time to time complained that core.img gets too 
big sometimes to be embedded especially on raid configurations. So 
increasing size with this does not sound good on my ears.

> the line scanner would read a config file, which instruct extra
> modules to be loaded For example, to archive the same function of
> normal mode, we need:
> 
> advanced console interface + text menu interface + script engine.
> 
> Some advantage of this scheme:
> 
> 1, One set of command. Now, if we want to use command like search, we
> must also include normal.mod, whose purpose is just to provide the
> option analyzer.

Rescue is supposed to be minimal anyway.

> 2, The separation of interface and script engine.
> Interface deal with interaction with user, like draw the menu, choose
> an menu item, edit a string, etc. Script engine is responsible for the
> interpretation of commands. These two parts are independent, we
> shouldn't bundle them into a single normal.mod.This would make modules
> like graphic interface more difficult to implement.

Well interaction between textual menu, graphical menu and shell 
interface will be studied anyway by Colin during his GSoC activities so 
lets wait what we get from there before jumping too far.