Re: Freeze break: gnome-shell: network menu overflow

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2011-04-03 at 10:05 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Le samedi 02 avril 2011, à 22:16 -0400, Owen Taylor a écrit :
> > Patch in the bug take a simple approach of adding a scrollbar to the
> > section when needed. I think the patch is pretty low risk because it
> > doesn't add any complicated tracking logic. There are a few hackish
> > low-level layout and event handling aspects but it's certainly not
> > the level of hack that there would be to add a scrollbar to a GtkMenu -
> > menus in shell are basically just boxes with children.
> 
> I'm not a fan of adding this now if there are a few hackish things in
> it, as there will be basically no time to make sure it'll get fully
> tested.

Well, we have thorough testing of how things are working currently,
and it isn't pretty. Dense accumulations of wireless networks are pretty
normal.

The hackish parts are to avoid larger and much riskier real fixes
(width-for-height layout for StBoxLayout, rewriting event handling in
StScrollbar), and I feel they are *relatively* safe. The most likely
sort of bad bug might be some sort of corner case where we would get a
thrown exception and a stuck menu up, but clicking aronud the menu all
weekend I haven't seen that. FWIW...

> Also, I find it weird that it won't behave like overflowing GtkMenu...

I think it's probably weirder to *us* to have a scrollbar in a menu
than to *users* - e.g., the distinction between a GTK+ menu and a
webbrowser completion dropdown with a scrollbar is probably pretty
subtle to users.

> Is the long term plan to keep it with a scrollbar, or do you consider it
> more like a quick fix for 3.0?

I'm considering it more of a short-term fix. We don't have consensus
on a long term plan design yet. How should the items be ordered? Is
there are a More... expander or does More... take you  directly to
network settings? 

I'd like to improve ordering in the menu for 3.0.1 (right now, the 5
items that appear above More... are completely random), but that doesn't
fix the problem.

Basically, I don't think this is bad UI (except for the random
ordering.) It would be better with some visual tweaking, but I think it
will carry us to 3.2.

- Owen