Hi Wolfgang,
It's perfectly okay to submit bug reports in this forum.
Free-floating labels are associated with the main part of a control in a way such that when the master part changes position, the label is automatically repositioned. You see this, for example, when you move a control and the label also moves with it. What happens when you change a numeric or ring control to be an indicator is that the inc/dec arrows on the left of the control disappear, and the input area of the control (which is the master part of the control) grows leftward to occupy the empty space. This leftward movement of this part of the control causes a label that is on the left of the control (as opposed to, say, the top of the control) to also shift leftward in order to maintain the same distance from the master part. By the way. this doesn't just happen when you change the control mode programmatically. You can also see it if you change it in the editor.
The workaround for this is to record the position of the label
(ATTR_LABEL_LEFT) before you change the control mode, and then set it
back to the same position after you change the control mode.
I completely agree that this is a scenario in which most people probably wouldn't want the label to move, since the control as a whole isn't really "growing". But because the association is between the label and one specific part of the control, and because that specific part is growing, then this behavior happens as a consequence.
Because this behavior has always existed, even if we considered it
undesirable we couldn't really change it at this point, since by now
it's very likely that there are programs out there that have come to rely
on it, and changing the behavior would break backwards compatibility.
