Yelp 2.5.0: "More Than Meets the Eye"

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Yelp 2.5.0: "More Than Meets the Eye"
=====================================

Yelp 2.5.0: "More Than Meets the Eye" is finally here. For weeks I've
been watching Yelp crash alone. Now you can watch Yelp crash too!

What is it?
-----------
Yelp is the default help browser in GNOME 2. I'm supposed to write a
blurb about how it handles HTML, DocBook, man, and info.  But that would
be a lie. It handles DocBook. And does it ever handle DocBook!

What happened?
--------------
I've written a completely new transformation infastructure. It's fast,
it's clean, and it works. The man and info transformations have to be
reworked into this new system. That will take some work, but it will
happen. Lots and lots of stuff has changed, and it shows.

How can I help?
---------------
As a fun game, I've hidden an undetermined number of memory leaks in
this release. See how many you can find! If you really want to help with
Yelp, consider joining #docs on GIMPNet. I'm always there, and there's
always some work I can throw at someone. Read on for the list of known
problems and regressions. That's probably a good place to start hacking.

What's wrong?
-------------
First, if you're not actually testing development releases, please do
not use Yelp 2.5.0. This is an unstable development release. There are a
lot of problems and a lot of regressions. If I see somebody whining on
FootNotes about how I broke the help browser, I will take away that
person's socks.

Known Problems and Regressions:
-------------------------------

* The TOC pages look ugly.

* The categorization of the TOC pages needs work.

* The Edit and Go menus are empty. Their menu items should be fairly
easy to add back in.

* Going to a page from itself puts that page twice consecutively in the
history, which is annoying.

* If a page errors out, it should be removed from the history.

* HTML, man, and info don't work.

* SGML doesn't work, and it won't ever again. In fact, I'm listing this
as a new feature.

* Admonition graphics don't show up.

* Roughly 100 DocBook elements aren't implemented in the new XSLT. There
are a lot of easy fixes here for anybody who knows XSLT.  Try this:

grep FIXME `find . -name '*.xsl'`

* The previous and next links don't actually work.

* The selection on the sidebar doesn't follow link clicks.

* The titlebar for DocBook pages says "FIXME".

* A lot of the DocBook to HTML rendering looks rather poor. The XSLT
outputs some CSS that gtkhtml2 doesn't seem to like.

* Tables have an alternating color rule, but it's a fixed color. This
needs to follow the current GTK+ theme.

* The translation file for the new XSLT isn't set up yet. This needs to
happen soon, so that our fine translators can enjoy the hundreds of new
strings I'm throwing at them.

Where can I get it?
-------------------

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/yelp/2.5/


Happy testing!