Zypper Dialogs

I was puzzled by how to make good user dialogs (or prompts) in Zypper for quite some time. My idea was that they should:

• be translatable, including the answers (or options)
• have default option, that would be chosen with a simple Enter key stroke (or automatically in non-interactive mode)
• have the default option visibly marked
• have help
• be simple (have expert options hidden from default view)

This has gradually evolved into the following:

Download (curl) error for 'http://foo.bar/beer/content':
Error code: Connection failed
Error message: Couldn't resolve host 'foo.bar'

Abort, retry, ignore? [a/r/i/?] (a): ?

a - Skip retrieval of the file and abort current operation.
r - Try to retrieve the file again.
i - Skip retrieval of the file and try to continue with the operation without the file.
u - Change current base URI and try retrieving the file again.

[a/r/i/?] (a):

And a translated version:

Ukončiť, znova, ignorovať? [k/z/i/?] (k): ?

k - Preskoč súčasný súbor a ukonči operáciu.
z - Skús stiahnuť súbor znova.
i - Preskoč súčasný súbor a pokračuj v operácii bez neho.
u - Zmeň základnú URI adresu a skús súbor stiahnuť znova.

[k/z/i/?] (k):

• the prompt options are made of a string like "a/r/i/u", which is marked for translation. Translators are advised in the source comment about the meaning of the options and that they
  should use lowercase letters to translate them (but even a longer string would work).


• The default option is chosen by the programmer, using its position (0 in the above example). On Enter, this option would be used as an answer.


• The default option is visibly shown in separate parentheses. First i thought highlighting it with some color would be nice, but then my colleagues convinced me that showing different output in color/non-color mode was not a good idea.


• Whenever there's help or more options available, a question mark (?) is shown as one of the possible options. When entered, the help would be shown, as you can see in the examples above.


• Programmer can choose how many options should be shown, the rest will be hidden. Only the most important options should be shown, the rest will be listed after entering the '?'.

It's surely not perfect, but hopefully quite usable. Debian's apt does something similar, but i'm not sure about the translations and other details.

todo: Allow to pass arguments together with the option as part of the answer. This would allow to e.g. remove particular package from the list of to-be-installed packages when seeing the summary. Or show detailed info (e.g. changelog) of a package that caught your attention in the summary before starting the installation.

(oh, did i mention that we'd be glad to receive patches implementing any of the todo's i mention in my blog posts? :O) If you like zypper and would enjoy some coding in C++, don't hesitate to contact us).