GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 59632
gnome-about: hyperlinks for authors and the app itself
Last modified: 2006-04-18 18:10:15 UTC
It would be nice to have a URI associated to each contributor and the project itself. It would be accessible by clicking on contributor names and the project icon (with a floating underline to show which names are clickable), much like my previous canvas-based gnome-about rewrite allowed.
Reassigning this bug to myself
Adding keywords on bugs I've touched. This is basically spam; you can filter on the phrase 'luis doing GNOME2 work' to get rid of them all.
No offense but this is a really bad idea. Applications stay around a lot longer than you probably think. Links are fragile. Pages move Links get broken. Embedding hardcoded links into an application is so incredibly likely to break that you are probably creating problems for yourself. Brittle design with no future proofing should be avoided where possible. Email addresses are already included in the about dialog of some applications, and you have probably already noticed how often they are out of date and how often past maintainers get asked questions about projects they no longer maintain. The safest thing to do is to centralise things. Provide as few links as possible to a single central site (your applications web site) where things can be more easily kept up to date. Adding this functionality invites developers to use it without thinking through the consequences. I would urge you not to implement this feature or to at least be very cautious about it. (If you choose to accept my arguement and not implement the feature it may be necessary to document this somewhere, discouraging developers from including email links and email addresses. Please let me know and I'll try and help provide the necessary documentation)
That's such a negative, crappy attitude, about such a really minor component of things. So what if one link in the about box breaks occasionally, if it makes some contributors more happy about contributing.
> That's such a negative, crappy attitude, sorry about the attitude, other things bothering me and it seems to be coming through all to clearly I realise it is a minor and pedantic detail but broken links happen all the time and people do get annoyed by them.
since gtkaboutdialog is prefered can't this bug be closed?
If gtkaboutdialog make the links clickable then I suppose you could close this but I wouldn't close it otherwise.
The gtk about dialog provides a field for website which is a clickable link, so the first part of the request about having a link associated with the project itself is covered. http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkAboutDialog.html#GtkAboutDialog--website If you wanted to make clickable links of all the contributors names and addresses you would still need to do additional work. Given the dissatisfaction with Gnome specific functionality and the general move to GtkAbout perhaps this request should be refiled against GtkAbout? From my observation most developers would prefer if feedback was directed to the mailing lists or bugzilla rather than what many users do which is send mail directly to the (often former) authors or (often former) maintainers, which was part of my concern over making addresses into clickable links and making it even easier. I can not and do not blame users for using the easiest to find address so in gnome-games I have started to include the mailing list address in the comments section that appears in the main part of the About dialog so that the easiest to find address will be the one developers most want people to use. I do not argue any of the technical merits of this suggestion and if someone implemented it cleanly it would not be an issue. Of course It makes a whole lot of sense if you are going to provide links or email addresses to take the next logical step and make those links clickable. If developers are likely to make such a change it makes sense to allow them to do so in a clean and maintainable way. Luis makes the point that including peoples names in the About dialog makes people happier about contributing. I agree, I wish more projects were more generous and inclusive in what contributors they choose to list in their about dialog. Being able to point to ones name is a great way to show ordinary users you have done something to help Gnome and makes it easier to convince them they can too. I hope this makes my point of view and my reservations more understandable and in a more constructive way than my previous comments.
Moving this to gtk
GtkAboutDialog has this functionality.