[gnome-love] Easy project: Document writer credits in About boxes

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

Having received no response on the documentation list about this, it is
probably time to set the eager hoardes on the gnome-love list to work. 

The work required here is in multiple parts:

(1) Identify an application that has documentation, but does not show
any documenter credits in the about box (it will be the second tab in
the "Credits" section of the About box).
        - You can track down such applications just by browsing the
        available documentation in Yelp and then examining the
        "Help->About" menu item in the corresponding application.
        
        - At this point, even if you do not wish to create a patch,
        there is a real bug and, at a minimum, you should file a
        bugzilla report against the appropriate product.

(2) Look in the C source code and find the call to gnome_about_new().
The sixth parameter to gnome_about_new is a pointer to a NULL-terminated
array of strings (or NULL). The array contains a list of the documenters
names. So creating a patch to fix the problem would involve creating an
array of authors' names and passing the pointer to this array into
gnome_about_new().

(3) If the application uses glade to construct the about box, you should
just fill the names into the "authors" box in glade (load the .glade
file into glade, select the about box widget and look for "authors" on
the first tab in the widget properties window).

Any help will be much appreciated here.

Cheers,
Malcolm

-----Forwarded Message-----
From: Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>
To: GNOME Doc List <gnome-doc-list gnome org>
Subject: Document writer credits in About boxes
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 08:23:16 +1030

During a talk / demonstration about GNOME that I was giving yesterday, I
was showing off how the standard About box shows translator credits in
each locale that has translation. Of course, I then wanted to show that
we credit documenters as well.

Unfortunately, we don't do that quite as well as we could. Part of the
reason is that translator credits happen automatically (they translate a
special string and the code puts it into the appropriate tab in the
dialog box). Documenter credits need to be manually inserted into the
source code by the maintainer. For the time being, we cannot easily
change the latter item (API compatibility), but it is something to think
about moving forwards.

However, for GNOME 2.6, we should make an effort to go through every
single application that has documentation and if all of the people who
have contributed significantly to an application's documentation are not
in the About box, send a patch to that maintainer (or at least a list of
who should be in the box; it is an easy change in the source to fix
this).

At the moment, documentation writers are not getting the credit they
deserve. This is unprofessional of us and we should fix it.

Cheers,
Malcolm