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

[Dieter Plaetinck]

On Fri, 6 Mar 2009 15:44:20 -0600
Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Scratch my "--aspect doesn't do much", i was using an alias that
already added an --aspect.
Anyway, I just switched all sizes to use the autosize feature in aif.
just the --aspect is hardcoded to 15 (i took this over from the
previous installer).

I did some testing and it looks good. 
I also made a bunch of screenshots. see before-* and after-* shots at:
http://users.edpnet.be/dieter/aif/

maybe we'll need to finetune a bit in some places where newlines should
be put to improve readability (see for example after-welcome.png or
after-partitioneditorfull.png ), but other then that it seems all
will be good.

Dieter