Re: the state of control-center help



"Would it be worthwhile to make 'working docs for all capplets' a goal
for 2.24?"
No, it would be a very, very bad idea.

A number of these issues have persisted since GNOME 2.20. That is, both
the Mouse capplet and the Appearance caplet had the same problem then. I
don't think it would be even remotely sane to postpone these omissions
until 2.24. There are a lot of distros trusting GNOME to push out high
quality releases, and blatantly out of date documentation is not going
to make that trust pay off.
Those multi-year known bugs tend not to go over well, and last I
checked, GNOME prides itself on usability and documentation. Help
buttons that don't help are a far cry from that goal, and frankly a huge
step back from whatever work has gone in to enhancing the user
experience. Hell, I would rather the Help buttons weren't there, even;
it would be less confusing than the existing arrangement. In other
words, I for one would consider this a release-critical showstopper bug,
and if I had the slightest inkling of how to write the documentation I
would be at it right about now.
(Since I don't, I will assume that others can fix this before I figure
it out myself; most of it can be solved by copying and pasting, it would
appear).

Also out of date for documentation are capplets using PolicyKit. For
example, Network Administration and Users Administration. Those ones are
even more deserving to be release-critical bugs, since these have had a
significant change in function including a very, very important new
button and a lot of disabled options that will immediately confuse a lot
of people. That the screenshots are not showing this Unlock button would
tell any new user that something is broken. (I can hear the confused
phone call already: "Help, a virus locked my computer!")



Bye,
-Dylan McCall





On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 18:31 +0100, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 12:22 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > I notice that the latest round of reshuffling tabs between capplets
> > left the docs behind.
> > The mouse capplet help talks about a no longer existing pointer
> > capplet,  the keyboard
> > capplet help talks about a layout options tab (which has been turned
> > into a secondary dialog),
> > the appearance capplet has no working docs at all...
> > 
> > Would it be worthwhile to make 'working docs for all capplets' a goal
> > for 2.24 
> >
> yes, definitely we want to have up-to-date docs,the problem is who is
> going to write them. I talked with Thomas at FOSDEM and we didn't know
> who was responsible for the docs, I even thought it was the gnome-doc
> team, so whatever we can do to fix this situation, let's do it :-)

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