Help Menu Slashing

[Richard Laager]

On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 21:45 -0700, Sean Egan wrote:
> 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.

I don't really care about this one way or another.

> > 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.

Then let's fix that page to be more useful, or point the link to the FAQ
or whatever. I think having some way to view Help information from the
application is useful. Just because the current link is bad doesn't mean
the menu and the item are bad.

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

I propose leavings things as they were (or moving the Debug Window to
Tools) and improving the documentation.php page to be more useful.

People that want to shrink their buddy list way down can, with only
cosmetic issues, right? As Nathan (IIRC) said, with longer translations
or people who want to go even further with the shrinking, removing the
Help menu won't necessarily be enough to allow them what they want if
you turn allow_shrink off.

People that don't want to shrink their buddy list down don't have to, so
where's the problem there?

Richard
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://pidgin.im/pipermail/devel/attachments/20070612/bbf00adc/attachment.sig>