chop down long menulists

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Thursday 20 November 2008 18:03, walter harms wrote:
> hi list,
> i had some trouble finding some specific item in the bb menu structure.
> the problem was simply the last entries where outside my terminal.
> that means they are way to long.

I do not understand. Where exactly were you trying to find
something - in menu interface created by "make menuconfig"?

> So i did some reordering that affect coreutils and networking.
> the changes are only cosmetic and if anyone has a better idea he is free to add that.
> 
> for coreutils i used one file, and added submenues based on the first
> character of the applet.
> 
> for networking i created a server and a client file.
> 
> I have the impression that the second way is more easy to maintain.

There will never be a total agreement on the best structure
of the menu. I propose to avoid going down this road.

One way of not spending our time on this is to realize that we are using
kernel's menuconfig code. And kernel's config is vastly bigger than ours.

So they will be forced to work on making kernel menuconfig bearable.
In fact, they already spent much time doing this. For example,
look at this wonderful debug:

  │ CONFIG_FEATURE_IFUPDOWN_IP_BUILTIN:                                                                                               │
...
  │ Symbol: FEATURE_IFUPDOWN_IP_BUILTIN [=y]
  │ Prompt: Use busybox ip applet
  │   Defined at networking/Config.in:337
  │   Depends on: FEATURE_IFUPDOWN_IP
  │   Location:
  │     -> Networking Utilities
  │       -> ifupdown (IFUPDOWN [=y])
  │         -> Use ip applet (FEATURE_IFUPDOWN_IP [=y])
  │   Selects: IP && FEATURE_IP_ADDRESS && FEATURE_IP_LINK && FEATURE_IP_ROUTE


IOW: let's be lazy! :)

As to your initial problem of searching for something in the entire .config -
it's usually easier to grep .config file directly, or grep */../Config.in files.

--
vda