kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Werner Almesberger <werner@...>]

Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> Your 1) is determined the by the size of the existing dialogs. This is 
> a fact, not an opinion.

I would estimate that most dialogs already fit well into a 640x480
limit. This leaves those that don't and any future changes to worry
about.

Now, whatever your size goal may be, you probably don't want to
manually test things over and over again to find out if you're
still within the limit. So it would be good if there was some way
to automate this.

Would it be feasible to add some means to generate all the dialogs
and print their size (for some reference project) ? This could then
be used as a regression test for future dialogs (or changes to
existing ones) and it would also flag the ones that don't fit yet.

They could then be worked on as resources permit. Even a limited
conversion can have its uses, considering that the extreme minimum
resolution would be mainly for emergencies. So if a rarely used
dialog doesn't fit, that may be tolerable.

Your point about developer time being scarce and expensive is well
taken, but lacking the resources to implement things immediately
shouldn't prevent us from setting long-term goals.

That way, any work on dialogs can take this long-term goal into
consideration and things will gradually improve or at least get
worse slowlier. Also, if some dialog exceeds whatever larger limit
current reality dictates, the extra effort needed to make it fit
the more demanding limit may be small.

Last but not least, if we have some imperfections that we agree
should be solved but nobody is working on them yet, this can also
be an opportunity for newcomers who are looking for something
reasonably small and safe to work on.

So ... as a first step, do you think we could have such an
automated means to show the dialog sizes ?

- Werner