Re: (Possible) menu code rewrite
Chris Lawrence wrote:
> After banging my head against the wall with the Debian menu package
> for a while, I'm seriously considering a rewrite or a replacement
> package that accomplishes the following goals:
You're not the only one, Randolph Chung has a partial reimplementation
in C; I've been wishing I had the time to do something too. It badly
needs to be done.
> - Backward compatibility with /etc/menu-methods files (install-menu):
> I'm not all that enamored of the syntax. It may be better to start
> from scratch here.
So there's an entire programming language in there, and this is
probably menu's worst problem. The language is ill-specified, has ad-hoc
syntax, is not very powerful, and the implementation is dog slow. Since
I do mostly agree that having a full programming language on tap for the
menu-methods files, given the great diversity of outputs they need to
support. What I have been feeling would be the best thing to do is to
pick a real programming language (perl or python), and make the files be
written in that.
Implementing the old language on top of it would be a possibility; just
updating all the window managers with new files would probably be
easier.
I note the mention of XSLT elsewhere in this thread. Not being
interested in debating the merits of XML (I feel it's way overkill here,
but almost any data format is better than the existing weird menu file
format), I do hope that you find a more powerful language for the
menu-methods files than XSLT. The existing language they're written in,
for instance. Or intercal or something. :-P
--
see shy jo
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