FWD: Bug#54250: tasksel: UI consistency with whiptail/dialog (long)
Joey made some good points here. Please note that tasksel is in the boot
floppies cvs in the utilities/tasksel subdirectory. If anyone would like to
tackle some of these items, please feel free. I will likely be quite busy
with other things for the next 4-5 days.
thanks,
randolph
----- Forwarded message from Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> -----
Subject: Bug#54250: tasksel: UI consistency with whiptail/dialog (long)
Reply-To: Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>, 54250@bugs.debian.org
Date: 7 Jan 2000 04:26:41 -0000
From: Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Package: tasksel
Version: 1.0-2
Severity: wishlist
Since tasksel is going to be used in the initial install (after reboot),
meshed in with several other questions asked via debconf and whiptail, I
think it'd be useful if it's interface was a bit more similar to that of
whiptail.
This is just a couple of points of different I observed comparing tasksel and
whiptail --checklist foo 10 30 3 foo '' '' baz '' '' bar '' '' --title foo --backtitle bar
* Whiptail uses square brackets to indicate a multiselect list. Ie,
"[ ] foo" and "[ ] foo". Since it uses "( )" for radio buttons, tasksel's
use of them for multiselct is confusing.
* Whiptail puts a highlight right in the middle of the brackets. This
naturally leads the eye to them, and indicates that you are going to
effect that part of the display. (I personally think that whiptail should
then reposition the cursor to be on top of the highlight it just printed,
but it doesn't do that.. You might want to consider doing so. OTOH, I
personally like the say dialog handles the whole thing better, with the
highlight bar..)
* Whiptail and dialog let you put a prompt in the box with the list. I
suggest you move the "Select the task package(s) appropriate for your
system:" line down and inside the box to comply.
* Whiptail and dialog left justify the screen title, while tasksel centers it.
* If you run "whiptail --title foo --checklist foo 10 30 2 foo '' '' baz ''
'' bar '' '' --backtitle foo", you can see how it handles scrolling. A
scroll bar for tasksel would be a great enhancement, though a bit more
ambitious than the rest of the changes I am requesting. (And who am I to
talk, I still haven't bothered to put one in pdmenu.. :-) Dialog's appoach is
much simpler, BTW, just little indicators top and bottom if there is more
up/down there.
* I think you'd do well to kill the line at the bottom of the screen and
turn most of what's there into buttons. "<Task Info> <Exit> <Help>". This
would leave it up to the user to discover enter/space toggles a selection
and tab cycles to the buttons, but that's pretty idiomatic anyway.
* The OK buttons in the help page and task info screen would be more in line
with whiptail if they were blue, and were "<OK>".
* If you run "whiptail --checklist foo 10 42 3 foo 'The foo package rocks'
'' baz 'Another awesome package!' '' bar 'something' '' --title foo", you
can see how it handles tags followed by descriptive text. I think tasksel
is calling out for the same thing, there needs to be a fixed size separator
between the task name and the short description.
Sorry for the length and multiple points of this bug report. Do not feel all
points must be answered for this bug to be closed; that'd be unfair.
-- System Information
Debian Release: potato
Kernel Version: Linux kite 2.2.13 #1 Sat Dec 18 14:38:41 PST 1999 i686 unknown
Versions of the packages tasksel depends on:
ii libc6 2.1.2-11 GNU C Library: Shared libraries and Timezone
ii slang1 1.3.9-1 The S-Lang programming library - runtime ver
----- End forwarded message -----
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