Re: Help browser plan -> Help content?

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Pat Costello wrote:

> All, 
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something significant. There's been a lot of intense activity 
> recently around the nature of the GNOME Help browser. Of course, this is an 
> important topic. My question, however, concerns the Help content which the 
> browser is supposed to browse. 
> 
> As things stand right now, what Help content is planned for GNOME 2.0? For 
> example: 
> 
> - Will the GNOME 2.0 desktop include the existing Help content from GNOME 1.4? 
> 
> - Will the GNOME 2.0 desktop include the existing Help content for the applets, 
> applications and utilities? 
> 

No, and no.

> Is that the plan, even though the existing material is largely out-of-date? Or 
> is there another understanding that I am missing? An update plan perhaps? I'm 
> not referring to the update necessary from sgml -> xml, I'm referring to the 
> informational content. 
> 
> The Sun documentation team are working on a lot of material that could be used 
> as generic GNOME Help content, for example the User Guide, and online manuals 
> for some applets and applications. However, we need to know what the current 
> vision for Help content is, and whether our material is going to be 
> incorporated. 
> 

The plan is to use Sun's contributed documentation where possible, and to
update the existing documentation elsewhere.

We will not be shipping out-of-date documentation. Some documentation
updating is already underway.

However, because of changing UI's, and because the question of which
applets/applications will be shipped, it is difficult to begin work on
very much of this. As more things are ported, the logjam here will begin
to clear.

Cheers,

John