On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 23:08 +0100, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote: > On Thursday 07 December 2006 23:39, Hollis Blanchard wrote: > > I thought we had two options: embedding tags, or ORing bits into an > > embedded long. When I suggested embedding tags, you told me it was too > > complicated so will cause developer errors. Have I misunderstood? > > I meant that the complexity of using bitfields plus a fixed-size structure is > identical to that of using tags. But I bet that it is more complicated to use > tags _by hand_. For me, "complex" and "complicated" are quite different. > > Besides how to make it look easier by predefined macros, please consider the > spec itself. With bitfields and fixed-size fields, all you must remember is: > > - What bits mean what > > - How to order values passed to a boot loader > > With tags, you need to remember: > > - What tags mean what > > - What tag size is expected to each tag > > - What tags must be combined with a given tag > > If you generate tags by programming, I don't think the use of tags is more > complicated. It can be even easier for a parser. However, when specifying > tags by hand, I cannot believe that it is as straightforward as using fields. > > If you allow me to use a "big gun", I would tell you that most system > programmers are used to fields, while they are not familar with writing tags.
I'm willing to go along with this, since I realized that only a tiny number of people will need to use this flags (and that number does not include me :). It seemed to work for GRUB Legacy, so I guess it can work here too. My loader code doesn't currently read either tags or flags, and since most people don't need this functionality I plan to check it in without that; it can be added later as needed. -Hollis _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
