Gtk-Doc Manual in DevHelp

["Sebastian Geiger (Lanoxx)" <lanoxx gmx net>]

Hi all,

I would like to discuss a proposal for bringing the Gtk-Doc Manual into
DevHelp. At the moment the Gtk-Doc manual can be read online at
developer.gnome.org [1] and by using yelp. I think yelp is not as useful
as devhelp for several reasons. The representation is different than in
devhelp, some cross references in the document do not work properly and
there is also no table of contents like devhelp has. While these are my
personal preferences of course I think it would do no harm to provide
the manual for DevHelp in addition to yelp.

I have already prepared patches for installing the Gtk-Doc Manual as
HTML files with DevHelp support. The patches can be found at [2]. I
asked Stefan Sauer the maintainer of Gtk-Doc about merging my patches
but he suggested to have discussion about this change on the mailing
list first. So my question is whether other GNOME developers would find
it useful to have the GTK-Doc manual in DevHelp?

I argue, that since the main target group of Gtk-Doc are developers and
not end-users Devhelp would be a better fit. This way develpers can find
all their documentation at one place (e.g. devhelp) and do not need to
keep two tools open. I would also like to point out that for a long time
I was not aware that the Gtk-Doc manual was available via yelp since the
list of help documents is pretty well hidden. I first thought that yelp
only showed the Ubuntu Documentation until I found that via Hamburger
Menu -> All Help one can access additional manuals.

My patch adds xsltproc to gtk-doc for generating HTML files from the
Gtk-Doc Manual and then uses an install hook to install the html files
and copy the Gtk-Doc stylesheets to $(datadir)/gtk-doc/html/$(HELP_ID).

I have tested my patch and I can view the GTK-Doc Manual in DevHelp. I
would be very happy if this change could be merged into Gtk-Doc.

Best Regards
Sebastian

[1]: https://developer.gnome.org/gtk-doc-manual/

[2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk-doc/commit/ffd5f97ed73a670f1b7687d9a39e80f5f7941332