Back in the days of kde3, while writing a KDE application, I encountered quite a big problem while trying to use the aboutbox stuff from KDE (that means kaboutdata and the now called kaboutapplicationdialog). I talked to some guys on #kde-devel, and I have been told that, yes, this will be changed for KDE4.
Now that I (mostly) use and (rarely) develop for KDE4, I have been hit again by the same problem. Before reporting to the bugtracking system of KDE, I would like to know what people think. Most importantly, do people outside of KDE proper do actually use this ?
Description of the problem
There is a field called bugsEmailAddress in the constructor of KAboutData, which is used by KAboutApplicationDialog to decide what to display. Using this field, something like
"Please report bugs to <a href=\"mailto:%1\">%2</a>.\n"
will be used to display the link in the about box. What does it mean ? First, it means that it is not possible to have a link to a web bug tracker. You need to provide a mail, and nothing else. Seeing how common are web bugtrackers, this is rather strange.
Though… what about KDE’s own applications ? The default value for bugsEmailAddress is “submit@bugs.kde.org”. So far, it makes perfectly sense. But if you open any KDE application, you’ll see a link to the web page. Why is it so ? look in kdelibs/kdeui/dialogs/kaboutapplicationdialog.cpp :
if ( .. || aboutData->bugAddress() == "submit@bugs.kde.org")
text = "Please use http://bugs.kde.org..."
I can only guess why this was done this way : probably for some historical reason and then nobody bothered about fixing it. I’m sure they have not done something as ugly on purpose.
So as a conclusion
- KDE uses a link to their web tracker.
- You are not allowed to such a luxury and you need to provide an email address.
Toward a fix ?
The obvious fix is to store an URL or linkAddress in KAboutData and use that in the About dialog. Adding a clear sentence to the documentation : “if you want to use an email address, just add mailto: in front of the argument”.
Now, instead of ranting, my first reaction was to go and fix that (I swear, trust me). Even few years ago. But.. then I’m confronted to a problem : probably some people use this, and I would break quite a lot of about boxes, and everybody will hate me. Not something I want of course.. I tried to talk about this on IRC, but nobody is really interested in this. And finally, i did not dare changing this, and wend the old way : I wrote my own about box.
Turn around
Today, I have found a way to turn around the problem : You can use the method setCustomAuthorText() and then, KDE will not do anything and let you decide about what to display in this tab. Hourray 
Wouldn’t it be trivial to provide an overloaded constructor with KUrl instead of the QByteArray now used for the email address?
I would check the contents of the variable. If it starts with ‘^[^/]+:’ just use this as link (so you can use https, etc). Else if it starts with ‘^[^/]+@’ prefix it by ‘mailto:’ and in any other case by ‘http://’
I find that breaking something is a way better solution than doing nothing. Since the breakage is the beginning for something better
What if the bug-address is checked for “http://”, “https://” etc.
If the given address does not start with the protocol, “mailto:” could be prepended and a warning displayed that this workaround will be removed soon?
Of course it is just a workaround but it would ease the transition…?
To keep compatibility with the old way, one can automatically add the “mailto:” prefix to non-valid URLs with a “@”. It shouldn’t be very hard.