# Make options partly invisible and offset



## Anonymous (Jan 7, 2013)

I'm trying to build Firefox 17.0.1, but the first page of make options is broken in some way that's not obvious.

When the panel is displayed, the option descriptions are visible, but the "checkboxes" are not. Moving the cursor to the bottom of the list and then back up makes the "checkboxes" visible, but they're offset (the description on line n refers to the checkbox on line n+1).

In the makefile the options look okay to me, and the Porters' Manual hasn't anything to say about this problem.  

Is there some subtle formatting issue that the Porters' Manual should mention but doesn't?


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## wblock@ (Jan 7, 2013)

What version of FreeBSD?

There are bug workarounds for the old dialog(1) in dialogwrapper.  To use it, make sure you have an updated ports tree, then add this to /etc/make.conf:

```
DIALOG="/usr/ports/Tools/scripts/dialogwrapper.sh"
```


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## Anonymous (Jan 7, 2013)

It's 8.3, 32bit.

Thanks, I'll try that.

-------------

That seems to work very well.  It should probably be a default.


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## wblock@ (Jan 7, 2013)

Just looked: yes, www/firefox has a configuration option, the last one, that is too long for the standard dialog(1) window.  The older version of dialog(1) in FreeBSD 8 has trouble showing those.  The newer version in FreeBSD 9 isn't perfect, either, so I wrote dialogwrapper to fix some of those problems.  In FreeBSD 9, you also get more features, like being able to use a larger window and see more options.  See /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/dialogwrapper.txt.


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## Anonymous (Jan 9, 2013)

It's a little bizarre that such a basic feature could still have such a simple bug.  I haven't written anything in curses for probably 25 years, but I seem to remember that it knew how to wrap gracefully.  Or isn't that panel written in curses?


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## wblock@ (Jan 9, 2013)

I think the bug is in dialog(1).  It may just be that dialog(1) does so many things that it is nearly impossible to test all the combinations.


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