removal of KWhatsThisManager?

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Friday 14 May 2010, Markus wrote:
> Does anybody even use the "What's this?" at all?
> IMHO that whole thing is an outdated concept from the Win95 days. Is
> there some firm usability data on that topic?

I have used it just the other day to get some info on some of Kate's 
settings. The "What's this" descriptions did help me understand the 
meaning of those settings. OTOH, if we had good user manuals then 
pressing the Help button would give me the same information. The problem 
with the user manuals is that the "What's this" text are sometimes added 
by the developers while developers rarely update the user manuals (at 
least in kdepim). Therefore, at the moment, the user manuals are no 
alternative to the "What's this" help. (Of course, all of this is IMHO.)


Regards,
Ingo


> Am Freitag 14 Mai 2010, 19:42:35 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> > hi everyone ...
> > 
> > KWhatsThisManager was introduced in 2004 as a way to hopefully get
> > some of our users contributing back whatsthis help entries by
> > showing a helpful "there is no content, if you'd like to provide
> > some content, click here" which then spawns an email that the
> > person may fill in. neat idea.
> > 
> > i don't know how successful it's been, but sometimes people do
> > click on it
> > 
> > and try to help out, as can be seen here:
> > 	https://bugs.kde.org/237488?id=237488
> > 
> > unfortunately, the email address it uses bounces. i just tried
> > myself and apparently it goes to kde-usability-issues at kde.org
> > which no longer exists.
> > 
> > the question i have is: do we want to maintain this service? if so,
> > it needs to be made more robust and that email needs to go
> > somewhere. and i could probably just file a sysadmin bug to get
> > that hooked up somewhere... but the question is: where?
> > 
> > personally, i don't think it's worth maintaining. why?
> > 
> > * it installs a global event filter on the qApp as soon as you
> > create a KDialog or KMainWindow
> > 
> > * for applications that are not written by the core KDE community,
> > there is really very little we can do with the submissions, and
> > we're now getting complaints about this on kde-devel
> > 
> > * i'm not sure it's the most elegant thing to show a bunch of "no
> > content..", "no content.." messages to people; given that we still
> > have such widgets all over the place in KDE, i don't think this
> > idea has actually worked out
> > 
> > * it's obviously not being overly well maintained at the moment :)
> > 
> > so, unless there are any objections, i will remove
> > KWhatsThisManager from kdeui (thankfully it's a private class).

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