From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Michael Tremer To: development@lists.ipfire.org Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] Help for GUI Date: Fri, 22 May 2020 14:07:46 +0100 Message-ID: <7FF37A9F-CA61-4E44-A46A-6823B2C846F2@ipfire.org> In-Reply-To: <235d452b-478f-331a-78d4-8b1bdad18ddd@tfitzgeorge.me.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============8935097121496296702==" List-Id: --===============8935097121496296702== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hi, > On 18 May 2020, at 21:18, Tim FitzGeorge wrote: >=20 > Hi Michael, >=20 > On 16/05/2020 10:35, Michael Tremer wrote: >> Hi Tim, >>=20 >> Thank you very much for submitting these patches. >>=20 >> I am afraid that I must say that I oppose these changes. >>=20 >> 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: >>=20 >> * We do not have documentation for everything for a start >=20 > Actually, it's not too bad. The only menu items (out of 72) in the core > that I couldn't find help for are: >=20 > Status / VPN: Net-to-Net Statistics > Firewall / Firewall Groups > Firewall / Blue Access > Firewall / OpenVPN Roadwarrior connections log >=20 > Status / Qos Graphs * > Status / Modem Status > Status / Atm-status > Network / Network configuration * > Firewall / UPnP > IPFire / Help * > Log / Open VPN Log * >=20 > 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: >=20 > Status / Entropy > Status / Connections > Status / MDstat > Network / URL Filter >=20 >> * There is never this =E2=80=9Cjust read one sentence and you suddenly wil= l be > an expert=E2=80=9D thing this kind of promotes >>=20 > 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? Yeah, I suppose I give up this argument. *Some* documentation is better than nothing and people who generally know wha= t they are doing will probably benefit. >> 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? >=20 > 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 suppose nobody reads the manual before they buy anything. I also do not want to scare anyone away by claiming that IPFire is =E2=80=9Cf= or experts only=E2=80=9D. It isn=E2=80=99t. >=20 > 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. I still cannot my head around it why this is a problem. We have search that will find the right page, if you put in the keyword that = you will find on top of the page you are currently looking at. And the wiki has exactly the same hierarchy than the web UI. How can this go = wrong? >>=20 >> What is your rationale to implementing this? >=20 > 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.' >=20 > So I submitted the patches. I appreciate it, but it would have been nice if we could have had the discuss= ion first and come to a conclusion that everyone can live with. Plenty of people have commented on this. There have been some further threads= on the topic - or rather slight spin-offs - and suddenly there was absolute = silence. I do not value the opinion of people very much when they only have t= hat to give and are not willing to put any leg work in. In this case: Everyone wants better documentation, but only one(!) person is = actually editing it and improving it gradually. It is absolutely not okay for= a group of 10 people to tell that one person what they expect them to do. Therefore I personally feel that we are quite far away from what we can actua= lly do here. -Michael > 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. >=20 > 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. >=20 > Tim >=20 >>=20 >> Best, >> -Michael >>=20 >=20 --===============8935097121496296702==--