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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
> 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?

Could you perhaps generate some screenshots of these things, so we can
see? I think it would be better to remove the hardcoded sizes, but I
just want to see how things look too.