On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 02:38:51PM -0800, Ted Walther wrote: > Hi Bill. As the packager of "ratmenu", I've had to grapple with the > menu package, which you maintain. > > Bill, can you tell us the reason you chose to implement your own unique > configuration language for "menu"? Why did you choose to implement it > in C++ instead of re-using an already existing language like bourne > shell, tcl, or python? And finally, why did you make the menu language > so different from the other languages out there that even you couldn't > debug the problems it was having in ratmenu, and that I couldn't figure > it out because the language is undocumented?
I wrote in my platform that I took over menu because it was not maintained. The original author is Joost Witteveen, who started it in 1996. I did not make any design decision, my role was more to understand how menu was supposed to work, to document it, fix it and eventually add new features (mainly l10n support). I actually don't know much about C++ myself, but I received a lot of help from Morten Brix Pedersen. I try not to let my opinions about programming languages going in the way of fixing problem I find important. The ratmenu problem was actually a bug in the implementation of one install-menu function that was not used anywhere else and was not locale aware, not a bug in the menu-method. This was fixed in October. Given the convoluted way ratmenu implement submenus, I see the fact that Debian menu support it a major achievement. In retrospect, I believe menu design is sound, but the implementation suffered from lack of forward planning (particularly in the file formats). I think actually C++ was a good language choice, being fast and not requiring much of run-time support, but having better data structure support than C. I recently made a talk at FOSDEM about menu. I hope to eventually fix the slides and put them online. Cheers, -- Bill. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Imagine a large red swirl here. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
