Re: Mailing lists (Re: Candidacy: Joachim Noreiko)

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 28 Nov 2006, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 21:55:27 -0600
> From: Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>
> To: David Bolter <david bolter utoronto ca>
> Cc: "Mariano [ISO-8859-1] Suárez-Alvarez" <msuarezalvarez arnet com ar>,
>      Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>, foundation-list gnome org,
>      Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>
> Subject: Re: Mailing lists (Re: Candidacy: Joachim Noreiko)
>
> On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 12:19 -0500, David Bolter wrote:
> > Thinking aloud:
> > I wonder if we could expose the #gnome channel (or similar) as perhaps a
> > one-click "Get Help" menu item... perhaps under the "Place" menu.  The
> > user could have an automated nick that describes their distro etc.
> > Friendly #gnome or #gnome-help (or whatever) lurkers could say recognize
> > the nick as a help-needer and invite their questions.
>
> Congratulations, you just reinvented MonkeyChat.
>
> Ximian GNOME (or was it before that - Helix GNOME?) had a patch to add a
> "Help/Get help" menu item.  It would take you to a minimal IRC client on
> a predefined channel.  I have absolutely no idea of how it worked out.

I half heartedly objected to a similar suggestion to this on the usability
list before.  My main objection is actually the implementation rather than
the feature, and I humbly request that if anyone wants to add the same
menu item across all of Gnome they really should make sure to create a GTK
stock item so the label and to a lesser extent the icon will be consistent
everywhere.  (In fact I'd quite like to see the stock items in Ubuntu like
"Report a bug" pushed upstream to Gtk since they aren't the only ones who
like that idea.)

If you are a monoglot this might not seem important but when you scale it
up to the myriad of languages used in Gnome and the many individual
programs that would otherwise need to translate any new string it very
quickly becomes madness to do this any other way (but since it is almost
always "someone elses problem" these things all too often get left to
brute force).

Similarly if people really wanted a menu item for "Help, Software Freedom"
or "Get Involved" I hope it would be done properly.  Personally a
prominent section in the documentation might be a better first step as it
would be better suited to providing the level of detail needed, explaing
not only the license but the philosophy.  Since I believe some
applications already do make an effort to include something like this in
their documentation it would be a good opportunity to share it and put it
in a global section of the Gnome help.

Anyway this all seems rather offtopic and I hope people will bring these
suggestions to more suitable lists.

-- 
Alan