Subject: Re: sysinst maintainer?
To: None <perry@piermont.com>
From: Phil Nelson <phil@steelhead.cs.wwu.edu>
List: tech-install
Date: 08/17/1998 19:01:30
>BTW, no offense to Phil intended, but we might want to look at whether 
>some of the standard curses menu/window packages that come with
>ncurses might make some of this easier. (Or maybe not!)

I started my work with sysinst using ncurses and their menu package.
My first "working" prototype was ncurses based.  I found it very hard
to use.  You have to have CODE to set up each menu and it takes quite
a few lines of code to set up just 1 menu.  I believe that my menu
development went much faster with menuc ... even with having to code
menuc (which by the way is a successor of a program I did in 1980.)  I
recently added dynamic menus to menuc.  If menuc is missing anything
that ncurses menus have, it should not be that hard to add it.  If you
find something (I haven't looked recently at ncurses menu) please let
me know.  Currently, menuc requires the use of the selection character
and that limits menus to a maximum of around 58 entries.  It has been
suggested we could do unlimited menus with a flag that tunrs off the
selection character and forces the use of next/page down to select.

But in any case, feel free to do something else.

One other thing about ncurses is that it is much larger in code size
than BSD curses and that IS an issue for the install disks.


-- 
Phil Nelson
phil@steelhead.cs.wwu.edu (NetBSD/pc532 machine)
phil@cs.wwu.edu (work)
http://www.cs.wwu.edu/~phil