GnomeAbout: I'm pissed and bitter

[ERDI Gergo <cactus cactus rulez org>]

Hi,

I'm probably one of the something like ten people in the world who cares
about GnomeAbout. Unfortunately, the other nine, apparently, don't use
GNOME. So I'd like to make an ass of myself by bitching about the current
GnomeAbout dialog.

First let me tell you a little history of my involvment in GnomeAbout, to
understand why I'm in great pain. 

	1, I rewrote GnomeAbout to make the code readable. This mainly
	   meant manually "disassembling" integer literals, i.e. figuring
	   out that x==10 here because it is the sum of the padding, the
	   border width, the text margins, and the text indentation.
	   Believe me, this was not fun.

	2, Then I rewrote it to use the Gnome Canvas.

	3, Then it all payed off, when the new Canvas-based approach
	   enabled me to implement the often-requested feature of
	   clickable email addresses and project and author weblinks.

	4, I've also made GnomeAbout themeable thru the standard gtkrc
	   features.

	5, I let it bit-rot. Yes, I'm guilty of this.

	6, Some time after GUADEC, when the gnome-libs separation was
	   finished, I began working on porting GnomeAbout's font usage to
	   Pango (fixing GnomeCanvasText as a by-product).

	7, So that's when Anders's New and Improved and Next-Generation
	   About dialog screenshots popped up. I was impressed. I'm still
	   impressed when I look at them. Anders was also becoming the
	   libgnomeui maintainer, so I was happy to stop work on
	   GNomeAbout, in hope of his very nice replacement.

So all was supposed to be well. Well, actually, I was worried when I saw
the new GNoemAbout API, with no trace of associating URI's and email
addresses with authors and projects. But I hoped it was all thought out
and everything will turn out great.

Until yesterday, when I fired up Gnomoku to test some recent GTKmm
changes, and clicked Help/About, and something popped up that looked
something you'd put in a Gnome BASIC demo application, hacked together in
five minutes.

So the reason I am sad now is because we could have had one of two very
nice solutions. One a port of the old About dialog, with clickable URI's
(it even had floating underlines and a hand pointer:) and themeable colors
and fonts. The other one the very elegant-looking concept screenshots of
Anders. 

Instead, we now have this ugly dialog box.

-- 
   .--= ULLA! =---------------------.   `We are not here to give users what
   \     http://cactus.rulez.org     \   they want'  -- RMS, at GUADEC 2001
    `---= cactus cactus rulez org =---'
Phillistines demand David be tested for steroids.