[Pkg-mc-devel] MC 4.8.1-3

[Dmitry Smirnov]

Hi Andreas,

this is my lost reply from March 2 I'm re-sending.

#############

> >   * new beautiful 256 colour skins "modarin-1.1" by Oliver Lange
> 
> Hmmm, I tested this but I'm not that impressed.  Having the option to
> use 256 instead of 16 colors is OK, but loosing my loved blue background
> with no purpose is bad.

Wait a sec, nothing is bad regarding more skins - the default skin is 
untouched. That's not loosing, that's gaining. :)
Too bad you don't like it, but I just love the colors. :)
Now when 256 color mode is available I realised how badly I was missing it...

> Moreover if I use any of these skins the
> vertical lines liniting the panels are just missing.  I do not even need
> a screenshot to explain the problem - a simple cut-n-paste is enough:
> 
> Using: mc -u --skin modarin256:
> 
> ║/.audacity-data              │   4096│21. Feb 15:17║║/.audacity-data      
>        │   4096│21. Feb 15:17║
> 
> 
> Using: mc -u
> 
> │/.audacity-data              │   4096│21. Feb 15:17││/.audacity-data      
>        │   4096│21. Feb 15:17│
> 
> See the difference very left and very right as well as in the center?

Sure, double lines instead of single lines. I'm sure it's by design.
I think I know what was author's inspiration for this - an old Dos Navigator 
which was looking very similar as far as I can remember.

But you're saying frame is missing... I checked terminal window settings - 
it's using "DejaVu Sans Mono"... Maybe a little screenshot would be nice just 
to get a better understanding of how it appears to you. I'm attaching mine.

> Diving deeper into this I tried the "official" skins inside mc.
> 
> Those work fine regarding the lines: dark, darkfar, default, mc46,
> nicedark, sand256
> 
> Those show the same problem: double-lines, featured, gotar, xoria256
> 
> BTW, nicedark chooses black on black font for links to hidden files.
> Might be worth a bug report but I mind to less for this skin stuff.

IMHO sand256 is horrible - one can hardly use it, but it is good proof of 
concept. Their xoria256 is not too bad but color theme is just not my 
favourite. 
I'm having difficulties reproducing the issue you're experiencing.

Even when I try to start MC as

  LANG="de_DE.UTF-8" mc -S modarin256

I see correct double-lined frame.

 
> In short 2.+3. are fine, but 1. seems somehow unfinished but harmless (I
> would not have noticed it).

Those 256 color skins are indeed very new.


> > To me new colour themes is a big deal - for years I was waiting to have
> > nice comfortable MC skins and this is just what I needed. I hope many
> > people would like them too.
> 
> Would you consider fixing the issue with the missing '│'.  It is no
> issue which would finally stop me from uploading - just want to make you
> aware of this.  The fact that the official skin "double-lines" might
> give a hint that this is not actually an issue of the skins but perhaps
> a missing font package?  If this is the case I'd vote for a "Suggests"
> and adding a hint in the documentation what package is needed.  I would
> be not very happy about a "Recommends" which would bloat my server
> machines with unneeded stuff because I think I'll stick to default skin
> anyway.

I'm not sure if it is a missing font package. 
Likely it may be a particular font your terminal application is configured to 
use.

I could never expect this double lines frames would be so important to you 
unless something doesn't look well. Is it anything like frameless MC when you 
start it with '-s' argument?

I imagine replacing those characters with default ones will fix the problem 
for you.

My only concern here is about increased maintenance effort because if I start 
customising themes we will be shipping more variants and later it may cause 
inconvenience if we decide to drop some of them.
I could do a fancy regex to replace double lines characters with single line 
and save modified skin with different name. 
But perhaps it will be better to leave as is and let users do their own 
customisations. 
It's not too hard to save custom skins to ${HOME}/.local/share/mc/skins - they 
are perfectly loading from there.

I wouldn't spend too much time on skins so I'd prefer to keep them as is just 
for a moment. Maybe later we realise how to improve them, or upstream does or 
our users will suggest something.

Please let me know if you want to ship single-lined framed modifications.
Certainly it's not something too difficult to do.


Regards,
Dmitry.