Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 03:40:48 +0000 (UTC) From: Janne Snabb <snabb@epipe.com> To: David DEMELIER <demelier.david@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: New pkg-message[.in] guideline idea Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1006240204290.22303@tiktik.epipe.com> In-Reply-To: <AANLkTikl45HPa0qPn99ywCX_TI5Y3k2xcysQc8PLW6AO@mail.gmail.com> References: <AANLkTimAhMpVuTIj10XKW65Wl2c6zplyyjD83OO1Y-1I@mail.gmail.com> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1006231636010.22303@tiktik.epipe.com> <AANLkTikl45HPa0qPn99ywCX_TI5Y3k2xcysQc8PLW6AO@mail.gmail.com>
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On Wed, 23 Jun 2010, David DEMELIER wrote: > 2010/6/23 Janne Snabb <snabb@epipe.com>: >> I find it completely useless and plainly stupid to edit the >> pkg-messages of all ports to include lots of equal signs for tty-based >> formatting purposes. > > We can take a long time to do that (we don't have to do it quickly), > but it could be useful to standardize it for one reason : > You will see that it's a message from the port maintainer/submitter > and not from the program itself! Sometimes configure scripts stage say > some useless things to the user. You obviously did not get my point. I fully agree with you that displaying a line of equals signs on tty based interfaces to make the messages stand out from other crap when installing ports makes sense, but I STRONGLY oppose to the idea of putting this visual formatting in the actual message files. It is just not the right place to put it in. As I pointed out in my previous message, these messages are displayed by various different means for different purposes by different pieces of software (on tty, through GUI, on web sites, etc). Some of that software does not exist right now, but may be implemented in future (I am thinking here of for example a Synaptic like tool for managing the installed software). A line of equals signs looks good on a 80 character wide tty screen when the important message is surrounded by other non-important output, but it just looks stupid when displayed by a GUI or on a web site. Putting the visual cues in pkg-messages files would require every other display mechanism to have a logic to strip them out (for example when displaying the message on X display as a word-wrapped pop-up-window of random width). Why not just change the current display logic to emit these visual cues on a tty when installing ports? It is a single edit to a single file and does not introduce useless clutter in approximately 2209 pkg-message* files in the ports tree. I do realize that many of the current pkg-messages do include similar visual visual formatting already in a non-standard way. One port uses equals signs, another port uses hyphens, etc. Those should be all removed from pkg-messages when the ports infrastructure displays a standardized visual separator automatically. I do not oppose to the other related ideas (such as making a logic to optionally display a part of a message only when some option was enabled). -- Janne Snabb / EPIPE Communications snabb@epipe.com - http://epipe.com/
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