"Chmod" dialog: Use screenspace better (with patch)

[bugreporter]

MC's "chmod" dialog has its size hardcoded in the source -- both the overall size, and the size of the dialog's components.

The hardcoded numbers work well with the English language (see the attached screenshot "english_before.png").

They do NOT work well with many other languages (see the attached screenshot "international_before.png"; it uses German as an example). Perfectly translated strings overflow their allocated width. At the same time, the dialog leaves much blank space that stays unused.

The attached patch "mc-4.7.5.2-chmod_use_whitespace-1.patch" re-structures the "chmod" dialog's internal dimensions such that less of the dialog's area is wasted for whitespace. The dialog's outer dimensions stay untouched.

This improves the situation for non-English languages considerably (see the attached screenshot "international_after.png").

The dialog in English language still looks good (see the attached screenshot "english_after.png").

[bugreporter]

The blank before the "[ ]" boxes is actually used for something, so it must stay. An updated patch is attached: "mc-4.7.5.2-chmod_use_whitespace-2.patch".

[andrew_b]

chmod dialog is not only one where the i18n is implemented not quite correctly. Unfortunately, your patch also contains hardcoded widget positions. Try select several files in panel and then open chmod (or chown) dialog. You see that position of buttons are not well. I think, buttons should be located in two lines for this case.

In general, i18n of chmod and chown and many other dialogs should be reimplemented totally.

As a result, I'd close this ticket as wontfix because of #64.

[bugreporter]

Reopening.

These buttons overlap with and without the patch. The patch does not introduce that overlap. See the attached screenshot "international_before_and_after.png".

The patch does not solve all of the chmod dialog's problems. But it improves the current situation -- without introducing additional code, and without undesired side-effects. Please provide a better reason why you don't want it.

[andrew_b]

Replying to bugreporter:

The patch does not solve all of the chmod dialog's problems.

And why not fix all problems of one dialog at once?

Please provide a better reason why you don't want it.

Because this is a semi-solution of chmod i18n problems. Again, why not fix a chmod dialog completely at once?

[bugreporter]

Replying to andrew_b:

And why not fix all problems of one dialog at once?

The changes that are needed to fix all problems, and properly (from the ground up), are not trivial. They go beyond my current knowledge of MC, glib, and even C. What I can do is to find and fix things like missed opportunities (that's what the patch does), off-by-one errors, and so on. The boring groundwork.

And that is important, too. By replacing the existing set of hard-coded values with a better set, my trivial patch removes a lot of blatant ugliness in the non-English interface (see the screenshots). We must still wait for someone to do the big rewrite, but at least we have a more usable international interface while we wait.

The same can be done for the buttons in the chmod dialog (to spread them out horizontally a bit better), and perhaps also for other dialogs. But before doing more work it is interesting to see whether such semi-solutions have a chance of getting accepted upstream at all.

[gms]

Hi.
I've seen a fork of MC with solved i18n dialog buttons problem. The buttons were placed in 2 rows in chmod and chown dialogs. But I've forgotten what a fork it have been :(

[andrew_b]

Replying to gms:

I've seen a fork of MC with solved i18n dialog buttons problem. The buttons were placed in 2 rows in chmod and chown dialogs. But I've forgotten what a fork it have been :(

I have my own patches for that.

[andrew_b]

Created 2557_chmod_i18n branch (parent: maser).
Initial changeset:a3c0b3ba4d556820f4583132cdfcd0c0281265c9

[andrew_b]

Merged to master.
changeset:32de3c2215a44460302f66ef00abd513a5ecd7a8

git log --pretty=oneline 63c0f34..32de3c2

[slavazanko]

Cherry-picked in stable:

git log --pretty=oneline d8af12222..1cad05bb3