[et-mgmt-tools] Cobbler idea: PXE boot profile menu

[Michael DeHaan]

... snip ...

For those interested, I've pushed out the implementation that allows 
typing "menu" during the PXE boot process to get a menu or just pressing 
enter or waiting for timeout (currently 20 seconds) to get the local 
boot.   I think it will work rather well, comments welcome, so check it 
out...  every profile in Cobbler is shown in a sorted scrollable list... 
the list seems to scale fairly well -- I've tried it with 200 profiles 
thus far and it performed well.   The way the config is set up now, it 
should be sane for situations where either (A) the system is set to PXE 
every time or (B) the system is set to PXE when their is no local OS... 
I wanted to ensure that we covered both as folks appear to want both.

There aren't a lot of pressing features for Cobbler at this point, other 
than some internal stuff about the format of /var/lib/cobbler files 
(that shouldn't affect anyone -- it's mainly to make the API a bit more 
useful when feeding in huge chunks of template data), so I'll probably 
aim for a release of 0.4.0 sometime next week if there aren't any 
comments on what is already there -- I'd definitely welcome any 
suggestions for improvements on (or patches for) the PXE menu 
implementation.    The PXE menu files should probably be based on 
templates to allow custom timeouts/captions and such, though that can be 
dealt with in a later release.

$ yum install mercurial
$ hg clone http://hg.et.redhat.com/hg/emd/applications/cobbler cobbler
$ cd cobbler
$ make

--Michael