Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 17 Apr 2001 10:38:56 -0400 | From | "Eric S. Raymond" <> | Subject | Re: [kbuild-devel] CML2 1.1.3 is available |
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John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>: > > If there were already a library in ths stock Python distribution to digest > > .Xdefaults files I might consider this. Perhaps I'll write one. But I'm > > not going to bulk up the CML2 code with this marginal feature. > > Then support a private mechanism if you must. But leaving colors hard-coded > in the application is just as bad as leaving strings hard-coded there, and > for the same reasons: it's a point that needs to be adjustable for > accessibility. The whole point of CML2 is to make kernel configuration something > that Aunt Tillie (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) can do, and we are > all Aunt Tillies from time to time. That includes differing standards of > readability, quite apart from the differences in monitors that make > a Mac user's *red* look more like *orange* to me (and CML2 will be > used, perhaps even more often used, off stock x86 hardware). > > Without counting, I estimate that 50% of the problem (I won't say "bug" > in this context) reports you have had since 1.0.0 have been about colors. > The more users you get, the more such complaints there will be. Nail > this one to the wall before people start demanding contradictory changes. > > If you don't have a full X resources parser, then do a trivial scan of > just .Xdefaults and look for a few fixed cases like > > CMLConfigure*YColor: 0xrrbbgg > CMLConfigure*NColor: 0xrrbbgg > > etc. etc. Or provide a private .rc file. Or *something*.
Unfortunately, life is not so simple.
X speaks RRBBGG -- or does it? Suppose the user isn't running in 24-bit true-color mode; do I do my own dithering or quantization? The terminal emulators only know about the 16 EGA colors. So, should I support separate resource formats for X and menuconfig cases? But wait! The Linux console does RRBBGG.
Other possibility: support only the 16 EGA colors by name. But if I do that, some of the X colors are just *wrong* on standard gray background (cyan is a good example).
There's no way to get this right. So I choose to get it wrong in a simple way rather than a complex, costly way. -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
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