Help Menu Slashing

[Sean Egan]

On 6/11/07, Richard Laager <rlaager at wiktel.com> wrote:
> I'd like to re-raise my objection to the removal of the Help menu. It's
> my understanding that it was done to remedy the "problem" of people
> wanting to shrink their buddy list a ton and avoid the cosmetic issue of
> cutting off the Help menu. I think that's an insufficient justification
> for violating consistency with EVERY OTHER APPLICATION.

Even before removing Help, many developers were in favor of moving
Debug Window to Tools.

> We also lost the online help option, which seems like a big loss to me.

What crack are you smoking? Exactly what part of
http://pidgin.im/documentation.php/ do you think is useful to someone
looking in the Help menu? In fact,
 http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2142654,00.asp
specifically criticizes that menu option as being largely useless.
Even Luke agrees.

This leaves About as the only useful menu option in Help.

> I very strongly believe those changes should be reverted. I absolutely
> do NOT want to release like this.

I'm willing to come around on this. For ticket #307, I removed a buggy
work-around for problems caused by allow_shrink. We have similar
problems with the authentication mini-dialogs.

People would probably flip if we removed allow_shrink and kept the
Help menu (many are afraid people will still flip if we remove
allow_shrink even without the Help menu).

There's also the issue of GTK+ and window managers screwing up from
time to time trying to deal with 1x1 pixel windows.

All this said, I'm definitely willing to come around on this issue
somehow. What would you propose doing?