Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 10:49:13 -0400 From: Brian McGovern <bmcgover@cisco.com> To: Freebsd-qa@freebsd.org Subject: Detailed comments on sysinstall... Message-ID: <200108171449.f7HEnD659702@bmcgover-pc.cisco.com>
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Ok. Now that I have time to go back and get precise details, here we go.... I'm doing a custom install. I _always_ do a custom install for everything. I like the power of knowing whats going on my system :) I get down to the 'Choose Distributions menu'. Here is whats bugging me :) - - On the left side of the screen, on the 'highlighted' line, the 2nd character is never highlighted in blue. It looks silly, particularly on the lines that do not have an checkbox to put an 'X' in. You have two blue character spots just 'floating' out there. My suggestion would be to either fill this spot in, or perhaps even just highlight the entire line. I don't know how much more or less work this would be, but it would be my first choice. My second suggestion would be to only highlight the lefthand 'checkbox' space. While a little less noticable, I suspect a user would be able to still keep track of the 'cursor', and, it cuts way down on the amount that has to get maintained/redrawn when on the menu. I have not checked how this would affect the appearance on the other menus, but it might work well. - - I made reference to the refreshes looking cruddy last night. I expect its my video card/monitor at home. Here at work, it looks fine. What I was seeing at home was the actual refresh taking place, so it looked like I was trying to run sysinstall at, say, about 9600 baud during a major screen update. It looked really chunky. I'll have to look at this more when I get home. - - There is still the problem of trying to get off the Distribution screen and back to the custom install menu, but this does not appear to be easily reproduced. Sometimes it 'does the right thing', others, it jumps back to the main menu. It smells like maybe a function call where one of the local variables isn't being initialized, and its using its 'random' value to determine if it should exit back to the main menu, so there is a one in N occurance of the bug. I wouldn't stake my reputation on this guess, but it may be something to look for. Anyhow, thats it for now. I always pick on sysinstall, particularly on RC1 and RC2s, so don't take it personally. Having done QA for Cisco now for almost 5 years (and for other places before this), I've been trained to think that cosmetics are important as functionality ;) (See "The User Experience"). Over the next day or two, I'll start banging on the bits that count. -Brian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-qa" in the body of the message
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