[Aptitude-devel] Bug#624542: aptitude: better default parameter for package view

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2012/2/27 Daniel Hartwig <mandyke at gmail.com>:
> Osamu Aoki <osamu at debian.org> wrote:
>> Aptitude's package view list uses default pattern: %c%a%M%S %p %Z %v %V"
>>
>> This means: 2+2+2+2+1+30+1+7+1+10+1+10 = 69 spaces used.
>>
>> Still 11 unused space in standard 80 characters per line screen.
>
> By changing the default size of version fields we consume those 11
> characters of unused space.
>
> What is the effect of this on a user who has customized
> Aptitude::UI::Package-Display-Format to include extra information and
> still has all the default fields?  (That is, such a user is implicitly
> relying on the presence of those 11 unused characters.)
>
> Consider the alternative of leaving the default field widths unchanged
> and instead modifying the default value of UI::Package-Display-Format
> to specify extra width.  What is the effect on that same user?

Perhaps not many people use 80 column wide terminals that often.  If
somebody has customised and the new defaults are different and that
person happens to use 80-wide-characters, the person can customise
again?  It should be certainly easier for that than for people who
never changed the defaults.

Anyway I think that it helps to have sensible defaults, and version
numbers in debian today are much longer than it used to be 10 years
ago.  And with that line of reasoning, one would never be able to
change any field width at all, which is fudamentally wrong, especially
in the case of the "sizechange" field (bug #599209 [1]).

Cheers.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=599209