If a user makes a decision to resize a window such that part of a menu is hidden, why should I, the developer, prevent him? Who am I to say that the "Help" menu _must_ be seen? Perhaps that user never uses the menu, and so does not see any loss. I know I don't use the Help menu on any application 90% of the time. So, yes, I am saying that the user should be able to resize a window such that widgets (and therefore features) are hidden from view.
Once I make that stipulation, putting an absolute limit on how small a window can get is clearly an impossible task. How small is "too small"? 75% of the window? 50%? what about the buddy list, where its vertical height could be reasonably resized to show only a single buddy entry. Add to that, the fact that a single buddy entry might be one of two sizes. How do I compute "too small"? I think that users should be expected to exercise a little bit of responsibility here. IF they resize a window "too small," I would expect them to immediately increase its size. If they need a feature, I expect them to not hide it from view when they resize the window. Consistency is certainly of importance. But I don't agree that consistency is a sufficient excuse to repeat the mistakes other programmers are making in many cases. Here I still see no compelling reason to place an arbitrary restriction on what you can decide to do with your use of gaim. If gaim claimed to be part of GNOME, it might be a different story. GNOME makes specific promises to users about how applications will behave, as outlined in their HIG and other documents. Failure to follow the GNOME HIG is a bug - for GNOME applications. Gaim is not however, and so what, exactly, we are supposed to be consistent with is far less certain, far less clear-cut. In many cases, true consistency is clearly impossible. Gaim runs in GNOME, in KDE, in pretty much any X11 environment with any or no window manager or desktop environment. It also runs in Windows, and in OSX. the behavior of windows in these diverse environments can differ quite drastically. For that reason, most arguments for "consistency" fail to convince. They tend to boil down to "prefer my environment and my use patterns, who cares about anyone else." Any such decision often increases consistency with one environment only at the expense of consistency with some other environment. -- gaim window size unrestricted https://launchpad.net/bugs/59333 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs