[arch-releng] dialog sizes in archlinux-installer / aif

[Dieter Plaetinck]

Hi all,
A purely cosmetical issue, but something that I want to address:
the sizes of dialog boxes in aif

current approach in aif: some hardcoded values in the revelant
functions of lib-ui.
problem: for some dialogs they look good, for others they are waay to
big (if you've played with aif you may have noticed this already), and
hardcoding values is bad practice anyway.

Dialog seems to have an "auto sizing" (just fill in 0 as
height/width/.. parameter) feature which seems to work quite well: it
makes sure what you want to display fits in the dialog and there is
some extra padding space so it looks good, so I think I should use this.

However, the old installer
( http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=installer.git;a=blob_plain;f=setup;hb=HEAD )
seems to make use of the autosizing often, but also often it still uses
hardcoded values.  Is there any specific reason for this?  Can things
go "wrong" by just relying on auto-sizing everywhere?

Also, dialog provides an --aspect parameter to control the aspect when
using autosizing, however I don't see the need for this. without it,
dialog always makes sure the content fits nicely. Even more, I noticed
that even when you use extreme aspects (--aspect 1 or --aspect 500), it
still shows your content nicely (even if it's for example one long
line), looks to me like it doesn't even do much?

Dieter