Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> Agreed on both points; I will make the changes.
>
> On a wider point, I disklike the boolean method in general.
> Yes/No dialogs are deprecated in UI design in favour of more explicit
> verbs : eg. <goback> <partition>. In some of the d-i
> code, showing <goback> <yes> <no> is redundant: whats the difference
> between <no> and <goback> ? However its hard to change those
> dialogs as there is no method to present a non-boolean button
> question.
>
> Also, in some languages, eg. Irish (Gaeilge), my second language,
> there are no words for yes/no! (Instead you have to phrase things
> in terms of something like, "Do you want me to partition your
> disk? <I do> <I don't>", and make sure you use the same verb
> in all dialogs; a pain. Oh the joys of i18n. And yes, boolean algebra
> was invented by an Irishman, George Boole, or at least
> he lived in Ireland)).
Boole++
We do have the possibility of adding something like a 2 item choices
field to booleans, which could contain the test to be displayed in leu
of yes and no. Booleans would still be displayed as check boxes or
whatever in some frontends, and a frontend like the readline frontend
would still accept yes/no input.
So we could have:
Type: boolean
Choices: partition drive, cancel
Default: no
Description: Partition hard drive?
${partition-table}
I worry that if this is added we'd have to be careful to make sure the
choices always expressed a dichotomy, and not just a tuple of choices
though. Abusing it like this would be bad:
Type: boolean
Choices: Oldenburg, Bildungsstwhatever
Description: where should udebcamp be held?
(Sorry for the stupid example, I am just waking up.) Anyway, I can see
users^Wdevelopers making this mistake and then some debconf interfaces
have completly nonsensical results. They already do this with the "Click
on "no" if you don't want to do this" nonsense.
Hmm, another way to look at this is you really want a select list, but
you just want it to be displayed as a dialog box with a few buttons.
This comes back to the hinting idea:
Type: select
Choices: partition drive, edit partition table, cancel
Default: cancel
Hint-Choices: dialog-buttons
Description: Partition hard drive?
${partition-table}
--
see shy jo
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