Menus defined in boards.txt have no defined ordering

[sleemanj]

If one defines menus in a boards.txt there is no defined or even reliable or repeatable ordering for how those menus are sorted in the Tools menu

Example, if one defines menus thusly

menu.version    = Processor Version
menu.clock      = Processor Speed
menu.boot       = Use Bootloader
menu.core       = Millis, Tone Support
menu.millis_ppm  = Millis Accuracy
menu.print      = Print Support
menu.serial     = Serial Support
menu.lto        = Link Time Optimisation (1.6.11+ only)
menu.bodlevel   = Brown-out Detection Level
menu.advclk     = Override Clock Source
menu.advfrq     = Override Frequency
menu.advups     = Override Upload Speed

then one might reasonably expect them to be shown in this order (where a variant has that menu), however the actual results appear largely at-random with no discernible pattern I can see, not alpha, not first appearance in the file... I think it's just pretty much random.

[facchinm]

Hi @sleemanj,
this is due to HashSet not being intrinsically ordered in Java.
I've created a very simple PR to test this #7956 ; let me know if it fixes the issue so we can merge it safely, thanks!

[sleemanj]

Compiled and tested Linux x64 Java 8.

The ordering is now alpha by menu title and seems to work without issue.

That's certainly an improvement over random - core authors can easily fudge menu titles with a prefixed index number "01. Blah Menu", "02. Foo Menu", or they can also be a bit kludgy and use a sequences of zero width space characters before each menu whichseems to work (1 zero-width space = 1st item, 2 zero-width spaces = 2nd item...) also, just a bit hard to see what you're doing when coding it :-)

Ideally of course instead of alpha it would just preserve the order the menus were defined in boards.txt, but that might be more complicated.

[cmaglie]

@sleemanj could you try this build #7956 (comment)? I've used a LinkedHashSet instead of a TreeSet and it seems to work as intended. Java magics :-)

[sleemanj]

Compiled and tested Linux x64 Java 8.

Perfect