a mail message for Paul J. Condie

[L Murphy]

(I sent this message to pjc at pcbox.uucp, but our gateway from Internet
to uucp didn't recognize pcbox.  sorry for wasting net bandwidth)




To: pjc at pcbox.UUCP (Paul J. Condie)
Subject: menu(1)
Reply-to: murphy at dccs.upenn.edu
--text follows this line--

I got it to work on Ultrix 4.1.  I've never used it before, so I'm not
sure if it works the way it's supposed to.  Things seem to behave
okay.

A few things while building the program:

I had to change "#include <curses.h>" to "#include <cursesX.h>"
in a LOT of places (everywhere I could find it, including a .y file).
I don't know the history of why there is a curses.h and a cursesX.h on
Ultrix systems.  (Ultrix is DEC's version of BSD 4.3)

I had to change -lcurses to -lcursesX in all of the makefiles

in utilities.d/libgeti.d/popmenu.c, I had to add "static int" before
the _runMenu() subroutine.  (Earlier in the file _runMenu is
pre-declared as static int, but when the routine is actually defined,
the return value type is not stated.  I believe my compiler assumes
void, which is a mismatch).


I tested sample.m -- seemed to work okay.  A few things:

cursor keys didn't work (using a DECstation 3100, dxterm application,
with TERM environment variable set to vt100).

Tab key did a strange thing -- alternated between two menu items that
were four items apart.

Not obvious how to break out of one of those pop-ups (e.g. printer
menu).  The help screen says ESC is cancel selection, yet it doesn't
cancel anything.  But if I enter ESC ^r, then I get out of it.

Cannot cancel the Password popup screen with ESC ^r.

Users on our system use DEL as the backup-and-erase-character key, not
BackSpace.  Can menu be customized to accept both DEL and Backspace as
the backup-and-erase-character function?

The h command does not display help screen from sample.m (fortunately
? does)

Sometimes I press some keys, some extra numbers or letters precede my
command, and when I press a RETURN, a menu item that I didn't intend
to select gets chosen.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Another problem is that the menu definition language is not
documented.  Is there a list of the 'commands' and an explanation of
their syntax and use?  Some explanation of .TITLE, .LINE, .INCLUDE,
.SYSTEM, .POPMENU, and so on?

Without documentation, these menu scripts look pretty cryptic.  Also,
even with such documentation, a person would need UNIX experience to
be able to write these scripts.

I am on a team here at Penn which is evaluating systems for possible
use on campus as our Network campus-wide information system.  One of
the requirements for our system is that the menus and documents can be
easily updated by a variety of people who are definitely NOT Unix
persons (or VMS, or whatever).  We plan to make the system available
over the network, so that the end-users and the information updaters
would have VERY diverse backgrounds.

A system which used something more intuitive to design and
re-structure menus is desired.  For example, let's say we have a MAC
user updating a menu who wants to move menu item 4 down to between
items 7 and 8.  Something which has a visual representation of each
item and a way to point at, drag, and drop menu item 4 would be
intuitive to a MAC user (and an X-terminal user).

Do you have such an interface to your menu scripts language?  Or
anything that would make the information updates intuitive for non
unix experts?

There are a number of things which menu has that I liked (like those
little popup data entry screens, and non-echoing data entry fields for
passwords).  But there are definitely some problems...

Thanks for your time,
--lam

Internet: murphy at dccs.upenn.edu
--

--lam

Internet: murphy at dccs.upenn.edu