Bug#682538: cdebconf-text-udeb should provide a way to disable wrapping-around

[Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org>]

Package: cdebconf
Version: 0.171
Severity: normal

Hello,

The speech synthesis in the Debian installer currently has a few issues,
which can actually be fixed the same way: dropping wrap-around.

What happens is that what speech synthesis gets is what
cdebconf-text-udeb writes to the console, for instance it would receive
the above sentence as:

"The speech synthesis currently has a few issues, which can actually
be\nfixed the same way: dropping wrap-around.\n"

And thus it considers these as two sentences. This is because in a
terminal, lines are the semantic units. This is actually also deeply
cabled in actual speech synthesizers.

Another issue is this layout:

1: Choice 1,   4: Choice 4,
2: Choice 2,   5: Choice 5,
3: Choice 3,   6: Choice 6

The speech synthesis will read "1: Choice 1, 4: Choice 4, 2: Choice 2,
5: Choice 5, 3: Choice 3, 6: Choice 6", which is far from convenient.

A solution to both problems would be to simply disable wrapping, i.e.
when some option, environment variable or debconf variable is set, make
getwidth() return e.g. 8192 (not INT_MAX, because some functions would
try to allocate that). COLUMNS would work, but it would also break
applications run from shells invoked from the main menu, so perhaps
DEBCONF_TEXT_COLUMNS?

Samuel

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.0.4 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages cdebconf depends on:
ii  debconf               1.5.44
ii  dpkg                  1.16.4.3
ii  libc6                 2.13-33
ii  libdebian-installer4  0.81
ii  libnewt0.52           0.52.14-10
ii  libslang2             2.2.4-15
ii  libtextwrap1          0.1-13

cdebconf recommends no packages.

Versions of packages cdebconf suggests:
pn  cdebconf-gtk  <none>

-- debconf information:
  cdebconf/frontend/gtk:
  cdebconf/frontend/text:
  cdebconf/frontend/newt:
  cdebconf/frontend/none:
* cdebconf/frontend: newt

-- 
Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@fnac.net>
<B> l'alim je sais où elle est, elle est juste à côté de la dame qui dort
<g> B: clairement faut revoir les priorités dans la vie
<g> B: une dame ça se retrouve, un uptime...