On Tuesday 19 June 2007 15:49, Lukas Ocilka wrote:
When YaST developer or designer are designing the YaST dialogs, they need to define some relative sizes between widgets. Unfortunately, the worst cases cannot be expected and we usually ignore them.
Please, see the attachment in this mail. The 'Repository Description' is always replaced with a new one when some other repository is selected in the 'List of Repositories'. The worst case is that there fifty repositories in the 'List of Repositories' but most of the descriptions need thirty lines in the 'Repository Description'. Please, don't write that it would be a _wrong description_, such cases just happen time to time.
My idea of a solution would be a user-controllable slider in UI - a new widget for graphical UI. Users could then themselves decide what is more important for them if the data don't fit the UI because screen is not inflatable ;)
You mean a "splitter" widget, not a slider, right? Something like that:
http://doc.trolltech.com/3.3/qsplitter.html
This is something we are already using extensively in the YQPackageSelector,
but on the Qt/C++ level.
It does have its benefits, but it also comes at a cost. The major benefit is
of course that the user is free to resize subwindows so he can get more
screen space for things he is interested in at the cost of getting less
screen space for other widgets.
The real downside of that kind of widget, however, is that it's really hard to
specify reasonable initial behaviour. Maybe we could overcome that with
weights, so the application could specify to use, say, 30% for one subwindow
and 70% for the other. But it would probably mean that there would be no
automatic layout calculation to make other widgets fit in their natural size.
It would work well for wigets that don't have a natural size to begin with,
such as selection boxes, tables, rich text. Others like buttons, combo boxes
etc. would very often look very odd -- too large or too small, depending on
all the other widgets and the specified weights.
Other than that, this shouldn't be so hard to do for the Qt UI, and probably
similar for the Gtk UI. But would it also work for NCurses? I have no clue.
In general, we probably want to have such a widget (but not for 10.3 - too
late). But also in general, needing it is usually an indicator for
overcrowded dialogs. It might be worth while to try to figure out another way
of presenting the information.
CU
--
Stefan Hundhammer