When we change the About-dialog we should change some other things there, too, not only the author information.

On the first About tab: the short description of the purpose of Kleopatra.
Which is currently "Certificate Manager and Unified Crypto GUI" (and also used in the .desktop files).
Suggestion: "Certificate Manager and Cryptography App"
Andre suggested to bring GnuPG into it like "User Interface for GnuPG".
At least in the about-dialog I would have no issue with making the text longer and adding "using GnuPG as backend".

And do the Copyright lines really have to be there? If yes: wouldn't it make more sense to list the most recent first?
KMail, for example says "Copyright © JJJJ, KMail authors" (at least in my dated version on Debian…).

I will change the German translation so that only the translation team is listed there. I don't know the currently mentioned persons listed for Kleo's translation except Andre and I'm the one doing most translations since 2022.

I think we should better talk about this instead of only discussing this by ticket.

and why is the link to the bug tracker in the authors tab?
We could also discuss it the KDE Bugtracker is the best place to link to for that…

We could simplify the copyright lines to (if we make sure that the current names are listed as authors)

Copyright 2002-2024 The Kleopatra authors
Copyright 2002, 2004, 2007-2009 Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB
Copyright 2016-2018 Intevation GmbH
Copyright 2010-2024 g10 Code GmbH

alternatively using © instead of "Copyright". (Using both as in KMail is nonsense because © is the official abbreviation of the word "Copyright".)

The companies are copyright holders, but they are no authors. Therefore we cannot further simplify the copyright notice.

The line

Please use https://bugs.kde.org to report bugs.

seems to be hard-coded into the Authors tab. I see it in all KDE applications. Maybe it can be customized.

And it's in the Authors tab so that people don't email the authors if something doesn't work.

What about the simplification below. Add more authors and sort-lines as you like. There is no legal necessary to show a full list of copyright holders. Authors are not a legal term in the context of software because software is not considered a piece or art. From the GNU coding standards related to the version/about output:

This copyright notice only needs to mention the most recent year in
which changes were made--there's no need to list the years for previous
versions' changes.  You don't have to mention the name of the program in
these notices, if that is inconvenient, since it appeared in the first

diff --git a/src/aboutdata.cpp b/src/aboutdata.cpp
index 6f11b4397..f575bfbf9 100644
--- a/src/aboutdata.cpp
+++ b/src/aboutdata.cpp
@@ -43,23 +43,16 @@ struct about_data {
     const char *web;
 };
 
-static const about_data authors[] = {
-    {kli18n("Andre Heinecke"), kli18n("Current Maintainer"), "aheinecke@gnupg.org", nullptr},
-    {kli18n("Marc Mutz"), kli18n("Former Maintainer"), "mutz@kde.org", nullptr},
-    {kli18n("Steffen Hansen"), kli18n("Former Maintainer"), "hansen@kde.org", nullptr},
-    {kli18n("Matthias Kalle Dalheimer"), kli18n("Original Author"), "kalle@kde.org", nullptr},
-};
-
 static const about_data credits[] = {
-    {kli18n("David Faure"), kli18n("Backend configuration framework, KIO integration"), "faure@kde.org", nullptr},
-    {kli18n("Michel Boyer de la Giroday"),
-     kli18n("Key-state dependent colors and fonts in the certificates list"),
-     "michel@klaralvdalens-datakonsult.se",
-     nullptr},
-    {kli18n("Thomas Moenicke"), kli18n("Artwork"), "tm@php-qt.org", nullptr},
-    {kli18n("Frank Osterfeld"), kli18n("Resident gpgme/win wrangler, UI Server commands and dialogs"), "osterfeld@kde.org", nullptr},
-    {kli18n("Karl-Heinz Zimmer"), kli18n("DN display ordering support, infrastructure"), "khz@kde.org", nullptr},
-    {kli18n("Laurent Montel"), kli18n("Qt5 port, general code maintenance"), "montel@kde.org", nullptr},
+  {kli18n("Andre Heinecke"), nullptr, nullptr, nullptr},
+  {kli18n("David Faure"), nullptr, nullptr, nullptr},
+  {kli18n("Frank Osterfeld"), nullptr, nullptr, nullptr},
+  {kli18n("Ingo Kloecker"), nullptr, nullptr, nullptr},
+  {kli18n("Karl-Heinz Zimmer"),nullptr, nullptr, nullptr},
+  {kli18n("Laurent Montel"),nullptr, nullptr, nullptr},
+  {kli18n("Marc Mutz"), nullptr, nullptr, nullptr},
+  {kli18n("Michel Boyer de la Giroday"),nullptr, nullptr, nullptr},
+  {kli18n("Thomas Moenicke"), nullptr, nullptr, nullptr},
 };
 
 static void updateAboutDataFromSettings(KAboutData *about, const QSettings *settings)
@@ -129,21 +122,11 @@ AboutData::AboutData()
                  QLatin1String(kleopatra_version),
                  i18n("Certificate Manager and Unified Crypto GUI"),
                  KAboutLicense::GPL,
-                 i18n("(c) 2002 Steffen\u00A0Hansen, Matthias\u00A0Kalle\u00A0Dalheimer, Klar\u00E4lvdalens\u00A0Datakonsult\u00A0AB\n"
-                      "(c) 2004, 2007, 2008, 2009 Marc\u00A0Mutz, Klar\u00E4lvdalens\u00A0Datakonsult\u00A0AB") //
-                     + QLatin1Char('\n') //
-                     + i18n("(c) 2016-2018 Intevation GmbH") //
-                     + QLatin1Char('\n') //
-                     + i18n("(c) 2010-%1 The Kleopatra developers, g10 Code GmbH", QStringLiteral("2023")))
+                 i18n("(C) %1 g10 Code GmbH", QStringLiteral("2024"))
+                 + QLatin1Char('\n')
+                 + i18n("(see source code for a full list of legal notices)"))
 {
-    using ::authors;
     using ::credits;
-    for (unsigned int i = 0; i < sizeof authors / sizeof *authors; ++i) {
-        addAuthor(KLocalizedString(authors[i].name).toString(),
-                  KLocalizedString(authors[i].desc).toString(),
-                  QLatin1String(authors[i].email),
-                  QLatin1String(authors[i].web));
-    }
     for (unsigned int i = 0; i < sizeof credits / sizeof *credits; ++i) {
         addCredit(KLocalizedString(credits[i].name).toString(),
                   KLocalizedString(credits[i].desc).toString(),

I like this patch, I created a MR based on it (with some additional simplication) https://invent.kde.org/pim/kleopatra/-/merge_requests/299

A bunch of related merge requests:

• https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kcoreaddons/-/merge_requests/458 Remove the copyright statements from the license text
• https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kxmlgui/-/merge_requests/242 Tweak the design of about dialog
• https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kxmlgui/-/merge_requests/243 remove stretch

As this ticket is for vsd33, the nice design tweak has to go into another ticket, it will not be backported to kf5.

Regarding the removal of the stretch: Now there seems to be no space at all before the description. Could we have a one-line space before it?

In T7329#192861, @ebo wrote:

Regarding the removal of the stretch: Now there seems to be no space at all before the description. Could we have a one-line space before it?

Why do you think that there's no space at all? There should be the same standard spacing that's used everywhere else. And there should be no difference to the spacing you got before the removal of the stretch if the About window wasn't larger than needed. I see no reason to add additional spacing. If there is a problem with spacing in the Windows builds (which are using the old Windows Vista style) then we need to fix the style.

Saw it in a screenshot somewhere, can't find it now. I do not have a version with that commit.

On Windows you can not make the windows smaller than this:

So it would look strange to have the description very close to the top (like in the authors tab) and then a lot of whitespace below.
Maybe the stretch space was introduced originally to make this look better on windows…

If you use a tabbed layout you will always have the problem that some tabs have lots of whitespace and other tabs have little whitespace or even a scrollbar.

I have no idea why the About dialog is that large by default on Windows (with the Windows Vista style). On Linux (with the Breeze style) the About dialog is just large enough to show all information on the About tab without scrollbar (verified with Kleopatra, Kate showing a large image, Konsole, Dolphin).

https://invent.kde.org/pim/kleopatra/-/merge_requests/309

Kleopatra (master; KF6)

ALright, let's go with that latest version (rKLEOPATRAab32b52a6cf8)

A bunch more improvements (for gpg4win 5.0):

• https://invent.kde.org/pim/libkleo/-/merge_requests/165 Provides the gnupg and libgcrypt version as KAboutComponent to use in Kleopatra/gpgol.js/gpgpass
• https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kcoreaddons/-/merge_requests/462 Add overload in KAboutData
• https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kxmlgui/-/merge_requests/249 put gnugp/libgcrypt component on top of the generic components
• https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kxmlgui/-/merge_requests/255 to get a copy to clipboard button and more detailed platform information

With all these applied, I get:

and the following information are copied to clipboard

Kleopatra: 4.0.0.241170+git20241109T204235~b98d882fe (24.11.70)
GnuPG: 2.4.4
Libgcrypt: 1.10.3-unknown
KDE Frameworks: 6.9.0
Qt: Using 6.9.0 and built against 6.9.0
Fedora Linux 40 (KDE Plasma) (Wayland)
Build ABI: x86_64-little_endian-lp64
Kernel: linux 6.9.9-200.fc40.x86_64

"Tested" with VSD-beta-478, looks as expected