launchpad-reviewers team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I thought about this a bit more, and I keep coming back to thinking we
ought to increase the maximum text width in Launchpad.

We also ought to make the width and the font family consistent across
different text elements - that's a separate bug, but being able to get
there depends on agreeing how they should look.

I'd like to eventually do markup in Launchpad, but it seems like a big
solution to the fairly small problem of code/tracebacks/etc being
wrapped poorly.

Launchpad is a technical tool and a lot of the information in it is
computer text, where readability is seriously harmed by being wrapped
too soon.  I've attached a dump of 200 recent bugs from Launchpad and
you can see the majority of them do have machine output.  If you view
this in a 45-character-wide text editor it is clearly less readable
than at 80 characters.

<https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/435905/+attachment/2582319/+files/bugdump.txt>

On the other hand, English text with no line breaks will be unreadable
if it becomes extremely wide, but I think we have some room to go
before that becomes a problem.

Even within single descriptions (eg single reports from apport) there
is a mix of machine text and human language text.  Adding markdown
support would give people a chance to get this precisely right when
they care, but we'd still have to have some kind of default, and
automatically inserted text will likely not be precisely marked up.

So we have to make a tradeoff but at the moment I don't think we're
getting a good balance.

Because Launchpad uses a monospace font, 80em is not as many words
across the page as it would normally be, and because there is a
moderate amount of leading we can sustain having lines be a bit
longer.

We could put this behind a feature flag but I do think we should land it.

-- 
https://code.launchpad.net/~mbp/launchpad/bug-width/+merge/80161
Your team Launchpad code reviewers is requested to review the proposed merge of lp:~mbp/launchpad/bug-width into lp:launchpad.