Re: [Tails-dev] tails-greeter review

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Autor: intrigeri
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Assumptes nous: [Tails-dev] ***SPAM*** Re: tails-greeter review, [Tails-dev] tails-greeter country/layout lists [Was: tails-greeter review]
Assumpte: Re: [Tails-dev] tails-greeter review
Hi,

† wrote (15 Aug 2011 16:34:50 GMT) :
>> 1. Alt + Shift
>>
>> I don't understand what "Use Alt + Shift to switch layouts" means.
>> It seems pressing this shortcut is not needed, which is great.


> Well, that's true but it's available - I've tried to mimic gdm's
> behavior here: by pressing alt+shift you can change layout.


Fair enough, I didn't know about this feature.

Then keep the feature, but remove the help text which appears to be
unecessarily bloating the UI: GDM has no such text I believe => the
ones who are used to this feature already know how to use it.

>> 2. Pre-selected locale
>>
>> xx_XX locale, when available, should be the default when the xx
>> language is selected. E.g. when choosing say the "Deutsch" language, I
>> think de_DE should be the pre-selected locale, instead of the first
>> that comes in lexical order (de_AT).


> Fixed in git.


Great! I'll have a look later.

>> 3. Widgets and usability
>>
>> As I already said, the widget used to select a language is a pain to
>> use. If it's that hard to use a more appropriate widget, I think we
>> should at the very least allow the user to move the focused line by
>> typing the first letter of the desired language name.


> Could you point me particular glade file with this widget? I was
> unable to find it. Also I do not see scrollable widget in glade
> itself which is weird.


Indeed, it seems this part of the UI is not built using Glade.

I could only find that in Squeeze's gdm3 source dir:
$ ls ./gui/simple-greeter/gdm-language-*
Also rgrep GdmScrollableWidget, may be useful.

Let me tell you it's sligthly irritating to see you looking for that
UI source code at this time of the GSoC (i.e. after the suggested
pencils down time), while I've been repeatedly pointing you to this
piece of software as a source of inspiration for a long time.

> Maybe you can send me dummy glade file with this scrollable list
> widget and store so I can try to integrate it?


I've no time to hack tails-greeter currently, sorry.

>> Also, I still think it would be much better to just copy the widget
>> used by gdm-simple-greeter to allow choosing the language and locale
>> at the same time: asking Tails users to choose among strings like
>> "en_MX" is not an option, that's why "Español (México)" is much
>> better.


> Ok, I'll take a look.


Great. I'd feel better if this was written somewhere so that it cannot
be forgotten.

>> 4. Limited layout choice
>>
>> Seems like it's not possible to choose, say, the "Deutsch" language
>> and a keyboard layout that is not a German-based one. It's great to
>> have the most probable keyboard layouts easy to reach, but it's not
>> that great to be prevented to use, say, a qwerty keyboard layout.
>>
>> The keyboard layout UI in the gdm-simple-greeter panel is great I
>> think: the same layouts that are currently available in tails-greeter
>> for a given language would be part of the default list, and the
>> "Other" button would allow choosing another one as well as variants.


> I don't understand it at all. After I've chosen 'de' layout I still
> can switch back and forth with alt+shift to\from 'us' layout. Just
> like in gdm.


I'm not talking of switching back and forth.

I'm talking of someone who:
  1. needs to get her GNOME UI in Italian, because she happens to
     speak that language much better than English
  2. faces a qwerty (or qwertz, or azerty, or whatever) keyboard (e.g.
     because she's travelling)
  3. does not know touch-typing => the keyboard physical and logical
     layout must match


gdm-simple-greeter supports such a usecase in a pretty easy way,
*without* any need to know about or understand the Alt-Shift geek
trick.

As far as I can see, tails-greeter does not.

See what I mean?

>> 5. Phrasing and UI
>>
>> I'd replace "Enter here a password that will be asked to grant
>> administrator rights." with "Optionally enter an administration
>> password."
>>
>> Don't put ":" at the end of text labels ("Language:").
>>
>> Adding some margin between widgets, and between window border and
>> widgets, would be a great idea I think.
>>
>> Why is the current layout displayed inside square brackets (like
>> this: [XX])? Feels weird.


> Should be fixed in git. Although I'm not sure about margins - if
> they are not wide enough you can push adjusted glade file into git.


I'll look at it. How do we batch-refresh the .pot/.po files?

Bye,
--
intrigeri <intrigeri@???>
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