Re: [long] lots of problems, you did ask ... [was Re: RC1 stats]

[Cyrille Chepelov <cyrille chepelov org>]

Le Sat, May 25, 2002, à 05:29:32PM +0100, Alan Horkan a écrit:

(I'm replying to specific things; for too NSIS-related stuff, I'll let
Steffen answer -- he knows this stuff better).

> The installer generates a batch file that sets the %HOME% variable every
> time and then calls dia.  I think it would be much simpler to just add the
> following line to the autoexec.bat file:
> SET HOME=%windir%    REM Dia expects a Home variable.

[snip]

Beware that setting and retrieving the HOME directory, and its default value
is different on just *every* flavour of Windows so far. Some use
Autoexec.bat, some use the Registry, etc. This is really tricky. The batch
is a safe way to do.


> The tree view is intersting, but i was also hoping/expecting to see the
> new Preferences dialog and Hubert Figueres toolbar enhancement.

I'm not very up to date on this. Have these patches been committed ? Are
people waiting for me to commit them ? (I need to be made more aware of
them, then). Hubert's toolbar enhancement may be the button with the
right-pointing triangle, located in left upper corner, between the rulers.
You need to enable a setting in the prefs dialog to see it, IIRC.



> The installer sets up a load of things in the context menu.
> One them is obviously wrong:
> C:\Program Files\dia\bin\dia.bat
> and there are way too many of the others which are of the form
> Create X,
> where X is virtually all the export formats dia supports.
> These should be trimmed back to about five of the most useful/commonly
> used export formats and/or put into a "Convert to" submenu or something.

I plead guilty for writing the wishlist bug asking for these entries; a
submenu may be a good idea. dia 0.90.RC1 is on my work machine, but I didn't
have the time to check this.


> ** (dia.exe:4294447971): WARNING **: object_get_type(EML - Process)
> returned NULL
>
> ** (dia.exe:4294447971): WARNING **: object_get_type(EML - Instantiation)
> returned NULL
>
> ** (dia.exe:4294447971): WARNING **: object_get_type(EML - Interaction)
> returned NULL
>
> ** (dia.exe:4294447971): WARNING **: object_get_type(EML - Interaction
> (orthogonal)) returned NULL
>
> I guess this means that the EML shapes are missing.

Yes; EML.sheet MUST NOT BE DISTRIBUTED. 

The EML library has been contributed about a year ago; however, it lacks GPL
and Copyright headers. I pinged the original author so that he sends us a
fix, otherwise we don't legally have the right to distribute this work. He
failed to answer, so I disabled the objects/EML directory; normally
EML.sheet.in is not registered in sheets/Makefile.am anymore. I guess it's
still in the Win32 makefiles.


> point.  I was doing some testing to see how robust dia was.  I deleted the
> image dia_logo.png and this causes dia to fail to load, or at least stall
> for quite a while.  A tiny window comes up with the message loading and
> after quite a while the toolbox does eventually appear.

Well, if you break things, broken behaviour can't be totally unexpected....


> When i right click on a diagram and do not have an object selected i
> expected the Diagram Properties dialog (which includes background
> propeties) rather than an error message telling me i have not selected
> anything.  Alternatively (but less useful) if all you are going to do is
> tell me i have nothing seleceted then why not grey/gray out the Properties
> menu item.

Please file a minor enhancement bug; this would indeed be nice to fix.


> I like standard keybindings.  I like consistant keybindings.  I like
> Ctrl+Modifier (or whatever platform specific command key+Modifier).
> In RC1 Ctrl+W is bound to Save As.  I have never seen an application that
> uses this keybinding, Ctrl+W is always bound to Close.  I can only
> assume was an accident because of the proximity of Save As to Close.  To
> put it politely this really irks me.
> Show grid has been bound to G, (Ctrl+G is taken) which is inconsistant and
> mildy confusing.

(leaving this stuff to the keybinding experts)

> it still sucks that my laptop only has two buttons and i need to plugin a
> mouse to access the middle button features.  maybe ctrl+rightclick to
> emulate third button or perhaps someone knows of a workaround.

C-rightclick is indeed working very well on Windows.


> color you prefer).  It would be great if dia could be set to
> (centi)meters rather than inches based on my locale (but im geussing this
> is another win32 flaw).


dia talks centimetres only. We even get bug reports from the country which
usually inflicts us non-standard units (like Mozilla which won't let me set
the paper and margin sizes in units I can understand...)

read http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=61422&repeatmerged=yes
and have some fun. I actually resisted a couple times sending a reply (on a
"this is the revenge" tone)...

It would probably nice to make the default grid 2.5 mm across with the
visible grid 4x the actual grid size. This is usually what I do after a
little while, when I work on a diagram. May make even more sense to make
this a pref, and have these prefs be loaded as defaults when opening a new
diagram.

        -- Cyrille


-- 
Grumpf.