Re: Some thoughts on spotting light on wizards/assistants

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 11:58 +0100, Albert Vilella wrote:
> I suppose the trick here is to have a link between the wizard and the
> documentation underlying that wizard. And I can see a problem in here:
> 
> Me being Fedora Core biased, I can see Beagle pointing to the adequate
> system-config-*whatever* depending on the keyword, as the documentation
> underlying that wizard points to it. At some point, something/someone
> should tell Beagle that the documentation that refers to "netmask"
> points to the system-config-network wizard.
> 
> But one problem I see in the implementation of this wizard is that will
> vary between distros. And the links between the docs and the wizards
> will also vary.

I think the key here is to index based on the UI data included with the
config tool.  Ie, Glade.  I'm fairly sure this is what Mac OS X does as
well.  Failing that, we can probably fall back on the source code, since
almost all of these are written in interpreted languages, and we can
probably be smart enough to pick out various UI elements.  The
documentation could help here too, although I'd weigh that a lot less
than the rest.

I think you're right, though, the various implementations on various
distros make it harder.  Perhaps the bulk of the work would be in
integrating the search and highlighting into each framework, if you're
looking for an exact implementation.  (And Fedora doesn't even have a
control center anymore, do they?  They're all just items in a menu, no?)

Joe