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Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2012 11:23:49 -0600 (MDT)
From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
To: ports@freebsd.org
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Subject: CFT: ports options dialogwrapper
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A few weeks ago, there was talk of how short descriptions of port 
options were not helpful to users.  It also turns out that versions of 
dialog(1) used before 9.0-RELEASE had a bug that caused too-long 
descriptions to garble the display.

Another annoyance is that the options window does not take advantage of 
a larger display space.  It is hardcoded to assume an 80x24 display.

With a vast amount of help from Devin Teske, here is a sh(1) wrapper for 
dialog(1) that attempts to fix these problems.

Note: no changes are made to the ports system or dialog(1).

The readme.txt describes installation, example tests, and possible 
improvements.

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/dialogwrapper

Feedback welcome.


Note: there is an alternate version with a much smaller sh script and a 
larger, separate awk program.  I feel this is much more readable and 
maintainable than the quoting mess of sh(1).  However, it is two files, 
and arguably more code, and I have not tested it much.  These files are 
in the awk-version directory.