Re: [PATCH 0/3] Help for GUI

[Tim FitzGeorge <ipfr@tfitzgeorge.me.uk>]

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Hi Michael,

On 16/05/2020 10:35, Michael Tremer wrote:
> Hi Tim,
>
> Thank you very much for submitting these patches.
>
> I am afraid that I must say that I oppose these changes.
>
> This has recently been discussed on the community portal and although
I still have not made my mind up entirely, I think this not helpful to
anyone:
>
> * We do not have documentation for everything for a start

Actually, it's not too bad.  The only menu items (out of 72) in the core
that I couldn't find help for are:

Status / VPN: Net-to-Net Statistics
Firewall / Firewall Groups
Firewall / Blue Access
Firewall / OpenVPN Roadwarrior connections log

Status / Qos Graphs			*
Status / Modem Status
Status / Atm-status
Network / Network configuration		*
Firewall / UPnP
IPFire / Help				*
Log / Open VPN Log			*

and at least four of those (*) don't appear to exist.  There might well
be pages for some of these which I didn't see when I was adding the links.
There are also four pages which obviously require further work:

Status / Entropy
Status / Connections
Status / MDstat
Network / URL Filter

> * There is never this “just read one sentence and you suddenly will be
an expert” thing this kind of promotes
>
True.  But in the extreme this could be argued to say that IPFire
shouldn't provide any information in the wiki unless it's much more
detailed than the current wiki.  Where do you draw the line?


> Should we not rather link the wiki somewhere in the footer and
encourage people to start reading the whole thing from the start before
they do something?

I think the best place for this is either on the download page or in the
installer, so they get prompted to read the wiki before they start playing.

I suspect putting a link in the footer wouldn't help many people.  If
they can't find the wiki on the website they're probably not going to
find it in the GUI footer.

>
> What is your rationale to implementing this?

I was following the discussion in the community, and several people
seemed to be in favour of the idea. And to quote 'This suggestion has
been made plenty of times. I would be happy to accept patches, but so
far nobody wanted to work on it.'

So I submitted the patches.

I understand that there are two sides to the argument.  Having the wiki
pages linked as help will be beneficial to some people and will just get
other people into a mess quicker when they try to do something they
don't understand - but having a link to the wiki page may help some of
this latter group to realise that they don't understand and need to
learn more.

Which is going to be of most benefit to most people?  I think for me,
having the help links would be preferable, but that's for me, with my
skill set and personality.

Tim

>
> Best,
> -Michael
>