Re: Gnome-apt hmm
I finally actually ran gnome-apt, so now I can talk about it :-)
On Jan 30, Havoc Pennington decided to present us with:
>
> On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> >
> > More troublesome is that I needed the install a whole bunch of new GNOME
> > stuff and that broke a lot of others GNOME apps.. I couldn't even login
> > anymore since the panel is broken now :(.
> >
>
> Alpha software!
Yeah funny, my .99 panel works better than 0.30 did.
> > * You shouldn't need to be root to start gnome-apt and look at the packages
Perhaps, if it finds out it can't lock/write to stuff, it could
print a warning, then make a copy and work on the copy? Perhaps
it could ask for root's password if you're not root and
* you tell it to do a run, and
* if you made modifications to the selections, when you quit
gnome-apt perhaps it should ask `enter root's password to save
changes or press "cancel" to scrap them'?
> > * You need to clip column in the packagelist: right now they can overlap
> > (simple way to reproduce this: mark libc6 for deletion and the new
> > text in the status-column will be replaced with a longer string that
> > overlaps the next couple of columns)
>
> Oh, I see the problem. Thanks for the specific example. I'm not clipping
> the red GC I was using to draw broken packages. Non-red text is clipped,
> right?
Hmm no, not in my system. All text overlaps here.
> > * The text-widget used for the description is crap, but you already seem to
> > know that :)
>
> Someone could maybe hack a better display for the description... I don't
> know. It is probably more trouble than it's worth but maybe it wouldn't be
> that bad.
>
> The best way to make it bearable is to resize the info pane/window so the
> text widget is 80 columns, then you won't get the wrapping.
Well I have a nice piece of input for you. According to the dpkg
manuals (well somewhere), the description _should_ be
reformatted. Also, "blank" lines (those with a ".") should be
displayed as blank lines (not the "."). There is one special
case of lines that shouldn't be reformatted. From
internals.html (ch-descriptions.html):
7.1 Types of formatting line in the extended description
* Those starting with a single space are part of a
paragraph. Successive lines of this form will be
word-wrapped when displayed. The leading space will
usually be stripped off.
* Those starting with two or more spaces. These will be
displayed verbatim. If the display cannot be panned
horizontally the displaying program will linewrap them
`hard' (ie, without taking account of word breaks). If it
can they will be allowed to trail off to the right. None,
one or two initial spaces may be deleted, but the number
of spaces deleted from each line will be the same (so
that you can have indenting work correctly, for example).
* Those containing a single space followed by a single full
stop character. These are rendered as blank lines. This
is the only way to get a blank line - see below.
* Those containing a space, a full stop and some more
characters. These are for future expansion. Do not use
them.
So dselect is wrong here (too much stuff to fix, perhaps people
decided this was less important) and IMHO this was a matter of
consulting the documentation instead of emulating dselect :-)
(Of course some peole may read "word-wrapped" as meaning what
gnome-apt currently does, but I believe the intended meaning was
"reformatted" - at least, IIRC the webpages reformat this)
There is a problem where reformatting descriptions adds more
processing overhead... but should be worth it, no?
[]s,
|alo
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