Mail Archives: cygwin/2006/08/11/15:55:56
On Fri, 11 Aug 2006, Lee Maschmeyer wrote:
> I've seen some mention of making the Cygwin installer more Windows-like.
> While this is by no means agreed upon as a goal, I believe it wouldn't
> take very many changes to achieve.
As someone who has been trying to write some code to do exactly that for
the past year (in my copious spare time, of course), I can state with
confidence that your belief is wrong.
> I'm blind and obviously can't speak for sighted people, but I can tell
> you how most of us blinks work most of the time and we can see how many
> of you get distressed. :-)
> [snip description of the Windows Explorer detail view]
>
> IMHO, pop-ups for clipped items should be avoided; hence the display
> area on the bottom line should be as long as possible.
>
> Would this give everybody the information they need? Would the format be
> at least as convenient as the current one? Would anything be lost?
Let me clarify my sentence above. While it looks like there wouldn't be
too many *visual* changes in the code (except for the ability to use
keyboard shortcuts and access the values of all string fields at the
Windows level), there is a mountain of code that would need to be
rewritten to achieve this effect (i.e., use standard Windows controls).
What you seem to overlook (sorry for the puns) is the fact that the
package selection logic is currently very tightly intertwined with the
custom graphical code that displays the package selection lists.
Decoupling those two bits of functionality would be the first step in the
direction of having a more Windows-standard and accessibility-friendly
setup tool.
I've been (slowly) working on just such a design for the past year or so.
Searching the archives of the cygwin-apps list should bring up many a
discussion of how this could be done and what the final interface would
be. Let me just say that the actual key mappings and the visual layout
are the easiest things to tweak once the base design is in place.
Unless someone steps in with a patch that does the above, I, for one, am
going to be ignoring or angrily responding to any statements of the form
"it seems to me that it would be very easy and would not take too many
changes"...
HTH,
Igor
--
http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
|\ _,,,---,,_ pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu | igor AT watson DOT ibm DOT com
ZZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ Igor Peshansky, Ph.D. (name changed!)
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