Re: [XBoard-devel] forgot to mention

[Arun Persaud]

Hi

> xdg-open http://....
> 
> does open a new tab in the default browser for the mentioned URL.
> (Mentioning a local file, however, opened it in gedit, whih is indeed
> what happens on my system when I double-click a .html file, but which is
> not what we want.) It does require that the xdg-utils are installed,
> however.
> 
> I pushed a trial patch to hgm.nubati.net (master branch), which tries
> two methods to invoke the xdg-open command:
> 
> One is buttons in the About Box (now redone with the generic popup):
> "XBoard Home" and "What's New?". (I linked the What's New directly to
> the 4.6.0 page; this is after all 4.6.0...) The other is an extra menu
> item "On-line User Guide". Probably we should use one system or the
> other consistently, this is just to enable us to see what we like
> better. I would go for the menu, I think. (Then there would also be
> little reason to redo the About Box, other than that eventually I want
> to redo all dialogs with GenericPopUp to limit the effort of porting to
> other platforms.to just porting that single popup.)

yep, it would be great, if we could have this as an extra menu under
help. If you can figure out how to open the email application, we could
also add a "report bug" menu item (or better: link to savannah bug
tracker), which I think would make it a lot easier for people to get
involved with XBoard.

I think a help menu with the following points would be great

* man/info (later perhaps the local help format derived from the .texi file)
* report bugs, request features (link to savannah or if by email,
already create a template for the email containing version information, etc)
* user guide (the new file)
* help translate (link to TP)
* xboard homepage (link)
* about (version information)

Perhaps we can leave this reorganization for 4.6.1 though

> Btw, I think an on-line user guide is quite environmentally unfriendly,
> as every user is likely to use it at least once, and more likely a few
> dozen times. So it would be much better to get it to him in the initial
> download, where it will be zipped as well.

yes and no... online has the advantage that we can update it easily for
all users and I think that we might want to edit it more at the
beginning until it settles down a bit? Perhaps we should have it online
for 4.6.0 and think about a pdf that we attach for the later versions...
in which case we should probably write it in .texi (requirement for all
GNU project documentation) and create a pdf from there.

Arun