(In reply to comment #0)
> Hi :o)
> 
> I was just contemplating the gnome-about dialog, and it seemed "sub optimal", I
> decided I would like to make some changes.

I do not know if you are a developer but if you are then there is a much greater chance of your suggestions being adopted if you provide patches.  I think the main thing holding back gnome-about is that it not a priority for anyone to fix it.  (P.S.  Oh right, now I see your last comment.)

> First I would like it to be able to display versions of all libraries used by
> GNOME, perhaps by borrowing code from gnome-pkgview. I think a list of all

> I propose
> scrapping all this and replacing the info with standard gtk labels etc. A
> credits/contributor button would allow access to the credits, as in a gtk
> about_dialog.

I made the same suggestion for a Credits button in bug 346767.  

maybe the GtkAbout dialog could be hacked to include an animated name list instead of a graphical logo but if you are going to put the effort in you might want to reconsider the whole design entirely and just meet all the functional requirements.  

> What determines who gets in that list by the way ?

Not sure myself, I suspect people who have worked on the Gnome libs make up the majority of the list but it does seem rather a short list, and certainly isn't anything near the number of members in the foundation

it might be interesting to do like FreeCiv and have a dated list of Contributors almost like a changelog for each release but the ongoing maintainance of any such list seems like more hassle than it would be worth.  

> I would advise scrapping the bar of links for just one link to the website - it
> would reduce maintenance (in case of changes in URLs), 

All the links are to somewhere on Gnome.org at least in recent versions since I specifically changed the news link to use news.gnome.org and I'd leave them alone unless it was part of a larger overhaul.  Either way the older links MUST be maintained, so there is little to be gained from removing them.  

> these links will
> probably need changing anyhow with the website update. 

They really shouldn't if they do things properly.  The people updating the website need to provide appropriate redirects anytime they change the links since older versions of Gnome will still point to those pages, pretty much indefinately.  

> Some of the pages linked
> to are currently out of date. 

All the links look perfectly acceptable to me but I've only got Gnome 2.12 here right at the moment

> There are a lot of other changes I would like to do, like making it re-sizable,

for accessibility (different font sizes) that is something of a necessity 

> I'm going to start hacking on this now, please stop me if I'm doing something
> foolish. Please add your comments !

sounds reasonable to me but I suspect various people who dont care about accessibility will moan about junking the old animations, but if you have a bit of support from a few of the right people maybe we can get a dialog that does the job.  

Re Alan :o)

Thanks for the feedback, it's mucd appreciated ;)

> (P.S.  Oh right, now I see your last comment.)

Hehe. Looking over my initial bur report I realized that I didn't make it quite clear that I was trying to do something about it, sorry.

> maybe the GtkAbout dialog could be hacked to include an animated name list
> instead of a graphical logo but if you are going to put the effort in you
> might want to reconsider the whole design entirely and just meet all the 
> functional requirements.

Absolutely, after going over the code and thinking things out a little, I decided that if I do anything it will be a complete rewrite. As far as I can see, virtually all the code deals with drawing on the canvas, and this is exactly what I would like to remove. Btw, I wouldn't generally recommend rewriting software where a working code base exists, but I consider this a corner case of sorts.

> > What determines who gets in that list by the way ?

Thanks for the input on this. This list still seems somewhat of a mystery to me, I'm wondering if it would not be better to refer users to the proper places to get information about contributers (not sure precisely what those places are... Individual project dialog boxes for example...)

> > Some of the pages linked to are currently out of date.

> All the links are to somewhere on Gnome.org at least in recent versions
> since I specifically changed the news link to use news.gnome.org and
> I'd leave them alone unless it was part of a larger overhaul.

I think it was these two links that bothered me : developper.gnome.org is considered obsolete/out of date by some [1], and the software map link just seemed a little pitiful ;)

It just didn't seem right to give prominence to these pages, especially the two I mention above.

> Either way the older links MUST be maintained, so there is little to be 
> gained from removing them. 

Very true :o)

> for accessibility (different font sizes) that is something of a necessity 

Yes, as it stands I believe this dialog is completely inaccessible, this would be one of my main motivations for doing this work.

> sounds reasonable to me but I suspect various people who dont care about
> accessibility will moan about junking the old animations

Form the about GNOME page on w.g.o "GNOME is... Accessible". I view this as rather important. Some people have the great misfortune of not possessing all the abilities that the majority of us enjoy. Computers and software an be of immense help to the people, somewhat easing the pains that many endure. Computers and software can just as easily be completely useless to these people, and I believe it would be doing them a great injustice not to make the relatively small effort to cater for them.

Besides, considering accessibility issues can encourage good design. (If accessibility had been considered during the designing of gnome-about, the implementation would surely have been very different ;)

> but if you have a bit of support from a few of the right people maybe we can
> get a dialog that does the job.  

Well, I could go on for pages and pages about the problems with the actual implementation, the reasons for rewriting rather than modifying, the design of the replacement etc. As far as this project is concerned however it will probably be just as fast for me to write the darn thing ;)

As it stands I am relatively new to the GNOME community, apart from some regretfully intermittent contribution to the documentation project. I would feel uncomfortable asking for support for somthing as sketchy as my current plans for the about dialog. For the time being, I'll try to do my best, and let people juge the results.

Any comments/discussion beforehand is still more than welcome however ;)

Love, Karderio.


[1] http://live.gnome.org/Developer.Gnome.Org_Must_Die

I only read the bug (and the comments) very quickly, but here's a reply anyway :-)

I do think it's not a bad idea to have an About GNOME dialog that does not look like the stock About dialog. It's a special dialog in some way.

Lots of issues are related to our use of gnomecanvas, and I had hoped that the integration of a canvas in GTK+ would help. But it's taking time...

The list of contributors is in a header. It should be updated, btw ;-)

You're welcome to start a new dialog and propose it, though. It's not a big program, so...

Note that we have a new gnome-about in python now.

Keeping this bug as it is won't help us, since it's more about vague plans than specific issues (or the specific things pointed here are either fixed now or reported in another bug). So I'll close this bug, but please do open bugs for each specific issue you can think of.

Thanks!