On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 02:44:39AM +0200, Ulf Lamping wrote:
> Hi List!
>
> I've tried to put a list of authors as a notebook tab into the about
> dialog, but got some problems with this.
>
> My idea was to use the same mechanism like the current help pages, so
> having a text file installed, which is shown be Ethereal in the dialog.
>
> Following topics:
>
> 1. no short list of authors available.
There's no such thing as a "short" list of authors, there's only
"shorter" lists. :-)
% egrep 'AT' AUTHORS | wc -l
410
*Maybe* if we list only the "major" contributors rather than people
contributing only minor patches, it'll be small enough, although some of
the people who've contributed only minor patches aren't in the "others"
list at the end of AUTHORS.
Konqueror (the KDE Web browser) has a list of 25 authors in its About
dialog in KDE 3.0 - I suspect there are more than those 25 people who
have contributed patches. Our list might be larger even if we include
only the "major" contributors (new dissectors, major new capabilities
for existing dissectors, significant UI or capture-file format or...
enhancements), given that a lot of people have contributed dissectors.
> Currently we have two list of authors, the AUTHORS file (which is a bit
> verbose, containing detailed info of the task done, too long for this
> purpose)
For what it's worth, the "Authors" tab in the Konqueror "About" dialog
does have one-line descriptions of each of the authors' contributions.
> 2. the AUTHORS file contains non utf8 characters (e.g. line 597: Kent
> Engström), which confuses the gtk output functions
> Might have to apply some "utf8" filter into the output function.
That raises another issue - most of the entries I've put in AUTHORS use
ISO 8859/1 for accented letters, although in at least one case I
de-accented the letters because I was doing the checkin on OS X and had
Terminal configured to use UTF-8 rather than ISO 8859/1, and assumed
that others might not be reading AUTHORS with something expecting
8859/1, either.
In the best of all possible worlds, all non-ASCII text on UNIX might be
UTF-8, but, for better or worse, we don't yet live in that world - and,
on Windows, I have the impression that most text-handling software
expects either
1) ASCII or perhaps ASCII extended with some Windows code page
or
2) double-byte Unicode
which aren't UTF-8, either.
(If only the folks devising character sets in the mid-to-late '60's had
been thinking ahead and decided to go with a multi-byte universal
character set. :-) Then again, if only the folks devising date formats
in the '50's, '60's, and 70's had been thinking ahead and all decided to
go with a format that supported 4-digit year numbers....)