Re: Enabling help functionality for GNOME2

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Fri, 2002-05-17 at 05:36, Satyajit wrote:

>   I have a doubt regarding "how to access a help file from any path".
>   I mean is it possible for any application to access any help file present
>   in any path.

It should be possible if your program has specified the correct
directory parameters to gnome_program_init().  There are obvious bugs in
gnome_help_display_with_doc_id() which I am fixing (see #82140), so if
you are having trouble displaying help, this function may be the
culprit.

> 
>     Should I keep the help documents (user-guide/) under
>     "gnome-datadir/share/gnome/help"   directory only, so that any
> application can
>     access them (using gnome_help_display_desktop() API).

No.  You should put them in your application's installation prefix and
specify the corresponding paths to gnome_program_init().  This is quite
easy with the GNOME_PROGRAM_STANDARD_PROPERTIES macro and some cut&paste
work on configure.in and Makefile.am to ensure that the PREFIX,
SYSCONFDIR, DATADIR, and LIBDIR macros get substituted correctly.

>     You can also see the discussion on enabling help  at #73312

I've marked this monster-bug as invalid with the intention of splitting
it into fine-grained bugs.  The comment I put in it regards how to split
it.  So if you find additional problems, please create individual bug
reports instead of growing #73312, which is hard to follow as it is.

  Federico