Many reporters neglect to paste their components when opening a ticket (this produces a lots more ‘back and forth’ work for bug triage and devs). It saves volunteering time.
There is adequate space in the dialog to do so. You can easily place the components under the About info.
The ‘Copy to clipboard’ button is on the same tab that is open automatically when the dialog is shown. This is a call to action that will raise the probability of users sharing their kdenlive version and 3rd party dependencies.
We could also just put the ‘copy to clipboard’ button on the About page (as well) without crowding it with All The 3rd Party Things We Depend On? Because there are more of those than already listed there, and the list of significant ones will probably only ever grow over time - so having that as a separate (scrollable) tab for those and keeping the about us tab concise and clean isn’t necessarily a terrible design …
I’m not sure I follow? Aren’t they just putting what we have on the ‘Components’ tab under a tab that they call ‘Libraries’?
Their about tab is not the same as our “About + Components”, and our About is less busy, and I think in an good way (do you really need the redundancy in all of ‘(Git) Revision number, Hash, and Branch’?).
To be clear, I think adding a Copy to Clipboard button to the About tab is probably a good idea. But I’m much less convinced about the merit of merging Components with it to get one there.
The reason why components is ‘crowded’ is because a decision to add the description of what each component is used for or what it is. If you omitted that description OR (as a workaround) figured out a way to add the descriptions as tooltips or have them collapsable - there would be ample room and less ‘noise’.
In the FreeCAD example, they give you a cursory view of what’s installed. Copy to clipboard adds a lot more information for the dev when pasted. And the Libraries has a long verbose list of 3rd party libraries installed.
Which is what our Components tab does. I don’t know what I’m missing that makes you think we should make that less informative just so we can merge it with About?
That’s not what the example you’re saying we should follow seems to have done?
I’m not even really sure that very many users ever use the copy to clipboard button, or look at the about tab before reporting issues, but maybe also having the button there would be a good thing. It’s certainly a simple thing we could do.
That is something that can be introduced into the bug reporting process. Educating the userbase to do that. It could be mentioned in the bug report template, added to documentation, and even pop-up when kdenlive detects a crash occurred and offers steps on how to report bugs. This is especially important due to many users running kdenlive from distros that don’t build kdenlive with correct dependency versions. See How to deal with bug reports from folks using unsupported packaging (#2041) · Issues · Multimedia / Kdenlive · GitLab that is dealing with all the excess bugs (and the problem extends to both trackers (bugzilla and gitlab)).
Which is what our Components tab does. I don’t know what I’m missing that makes you think we should make that less informative just so we can merge it with About?
That’s not what the example you’re saying we should follow seems to have done?
The About dialog doesn’t have to be less informative. It could just be formatted in a way that is less ‘noisy’ and more whitespace-conscious. It already has very little on it and the little it does have isn’t formatted in the most effective or esthetic way. Components could fit on the About tab just fine and have room to spare for future 3rd party deps. BUT you don’t even have to display all 3rd party deps, instead (and this is exactly what FreeCAD does) you could keep what is currently displayed and the ‘Copy to clipboard’ can contain the rest of the verbose info that includes less prioritized 3rd party deps.
As for FreeCAD’s libraries tab, it displays that tab as text document and does so for License reasons.
Any chance we can make this happen and also update the bugzilla bug template requesting people to paste their ‘Copy to Clipboard’ info as part of their report ?
