Bug#1052377: gdm3: less than beautiful word-wrap decision seen in failed authentication message.

[Philip Hands]

Package: gdm3
Version: 45~beta-1
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

While testing Gnome installs using openQA I noticed that if providing the wrong
password, one is shown a message that is word-wrapped in an awkward manner:

  Sorry, password authentication didn't work. Please try
                         again.

you can see a screenshot of that here:

  https://openqa.debian.net/tests/190043#step/_graphical_wait_login/9

I would suggest that whatever is deciding to wrap that text could be improved to
prefer balancing the number of words in the two lines somewhat better, and to
prefer doing line breaks after punctuation, in order to obtain a result like:

  Sorry, password authentication didn't work.
               Please try again.

Even if it just did the most simple-minded thing: choosing to wrap as soon after
the middle of the string that it finds white-space, that would look better IMO:

  Sorry, password authentication
  didn't work. Please try again.

I'm sure that this bug actually exists in some library that gdm3 uses, so please
reassign it as appropriate.

I am aware that this is completely trivial (hence wishlist), but doing QA
testing tends to make one notice such things, and I'm sure that whatever is
making that line-break decision is making equally poor decisions in many other
places, and in other translations, and that the whole user experience might be
(very slightly) improved if it did a better job.

Cheers, Phil.