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Re: Welcoming Brian Dessent as setup maintainer
On Thu, 5 May 2005, Brian Dessent wrote:
> Christopher Faylor wrote:
>
> > > This is the Cygwin setup program. It can be used to perform both an
> > > initial setup and subsequent updates, so make sure you remember where
> > > you saved it.
> >
> > I like this idea.
>
> Okay, I've been working on the dialogs. I didn't want to completely gut
> them and redo them, which would probably be the sensible thing to do.
> But working within the framework of what's already there, I think I've
> made progress.
>
> I also implemented a method for embedding clickable URLs in the
> dialogs. So now the link on the first page is really a link (and I
> changed it from sources.redhat.com/cygwin/ to cygwin.com.) On the
> dos/unix page there is also a link that takes you to the part of the
> manual that's relevent for that.
>
> These dialogs still look like ass if you resize them because they do not
> adjust their dimensions. But, I think that can be corrected.
>
> I also improved the dependency display screen, with a larger font and
> more structured output.
>
> Here are screenshots of those three pages:
>
> http://dessent.net/cygwin/setup-dialogs1.png
> http://dessent.net/cygwin/setup-dialogs2.png
> http://dessent.net/cygwin/setup-dialogs3.png
>
> Here is a test version that you can play with. It has all of the above
> enabled.
>
> http://dessent.net/cygwin/setup.exe
>
> I don't know how far off I am to committing any of this, but I'd like
> feedback on the UI aspects of any of the above.
Brian,
These look really cool. Three points:
1) Do they work the same on Win9x? How about Win2k/NT?
2) Am I the only one who noticed the typo on the "Installation directory"
page? The "Unix (Recommended)" setting should say "LF line endings", not
"NL line endings", to be consistent with the DOS one.
3) It would be nice if the "Resolve Dependencies" were a bit more
fine-grained (i.e., if each unmet dependency were to be a list item with a
checkbox, so that the user could select individual dependencies to
install). This is probably for the future, as the same mechanism we'd use
for the package selection page could be reused here. In any case, it'd be
a good idea to put "(Recommended)" after the "Install these packages to
meet dependencies" checkbox.
Other than that, I love the ideas here (and the speed with which they're
implemented :-) ).
Igor
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