New pkg-message[.in] guideline idea

[David DEMELIER]

2010/6/24 Janne Snabb <snabb at epipe.com>:
> On Wed, 23 Jun 2010, David DEMELIER wrote:
>
>> 2010/6/23 Janne Snabb <snabb at 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.
>

I see, so maybe in the future you would like some tools that can print
the message, like a GTK+ dialog, QT dialog, or an other tool, if it's
your point I agree. I don't specially want a equal "==" line, I would
just something consistent, why not : nothing ? Yes we can just print
the text without any visual characters, and the [future] tool will
print the message as it want.

> 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 at epipe.com - http://epipe.com/
>



-- 
Demelier David