Re: Yelp Help

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 10:19, Rob Adams wrote:
> The gnome help system needs some serious loving.  It is absurd how long
> it takes to load even simple help documents in a Yelp window, especially
> considering the end result is simply a very basic-looking HTML document.
> 
> Something as simple as the help document for the calculator takes
> several seconds to load, even discounting the extremely long time it
> takes the Yelp window to even appear.
> 
> Complex documents like the gnumeric yelp seem never to appear.  The CPU
> will churn forever, as far as I can tell.  I've never actually had the
> patience to wait for the document to load.  Presumably it's measured in
> tens of minutes.
> 
> This requires some attention.  I see a couple of open bugs for yelp
> about speed-related issues, but nothing to address the core issues of
> why the heck is it so slow and what in the world is it doing?
> 
> Apparently, yelp spends all this time doing XSLT transformations.  Why
> can these not be simply precompiled?  This would also allow us to also
> use fancier stylesheets.  In cases where this is not possible, yelp
> should be able to at least cache the documents resulting from the
> transformation.
> 
> If for some reason none of this is possible, we need to rethink the way
> the help system works.  Because currently it is decidedly unhelpful.

Well, the good news is that it's being worked on from two directions:
Shaun McCance is putting a lot of effort into improving the document
markup so that documents appear faster. This will go a very long way
towards improving things and you should send him all your money to
encourage him. Of slightly less impact, but still useful, I am profiling
portions of scrollkeeper to try and speed things up down at that end so
that we can retrieve the document to be presented much faster and then
let Shaun's stuff get to work.

In short: it's being worked on. :-)

Cheers,
Malcolm