Philip Chee wrote:
On Sat, 23 Jul 2011 11:16:55 +0100, Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
Is there any obvious reason why the "about:config" interface
cannot/does not support hyperlinks to the relevant documentation,
rather than requiring the user to search for it in hyperspace ?
Most obvious reason: SeaMonkey is a totally volunteer driven community
project. There are no paid developers.
I understand that, and I am very grateful to those volunteers
for the finite-but-unbounded hours they have dedicated, and
will dedicate, to the development of this most useful suite.
To do this you would need.
1. Sufficient number of volunteers with the free time and skills to do this.
2. Get these volunteers to spend an indeterminate number of man hours
researching and documenting each of several thousand preferences
This may seem a naive question, but how on earth can those
several thousand preferences not already be documented ? How
can a volunteer usefully contribute to the project unless what
is already accomplished is properly documented ? Surely new
volunteers aren't expected to work out for themselves how
everything works, are they ? I do understand that this is
a distributed project, and that conventional ideas concerning
project management may not be entirely relevant, but I would
have thought (and expected) that everything accomplished so
far would be properly documented so that those who volunteer
to continue with the work will have a sound basis from which
to start.
3. Compile the information into an indexed and searchable format.
4. Write some code to the about:config screen to link each entry to the
relevant documentation.
Such effort would, at least, have been of great potential benefit
to all users of Seamonkey, whereas (and with the greatest respect)
some of the effort that has gone into Seamonkey 2.2 (such as
the switch to a tab-based browsing environment) is perhaps of
far more restricted potential benefit. As has been written
elsewhere, trying to bring Seamonkey into closer alignment
with Firefox behaviour is not necessarily well-advised : those
who want Firefox-like behaviour will already be using Firefox --
those of us that do not would (I suspect) prefer Seamonkey to
remain as it was, at least as regards the user interface.
Alternatively find someone who has already done all that.
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/whats-that-preference/>
Sadly that potential solution, interesting though it is, is
apparently not relevant to this lists ("Seamonkey-support"),
as it appears to work solely with a different product
(Firefox 7 and later).
Philip Taylor
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