Re: The great "Yelp Patch Cleanup"

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 18:38 +0100, Don Scorgie wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> As part of the ever-ongoing "Great Bugzilla Cleanup" for Yelp, I've been
> looking at the patches that are currently sitting there.  This email is
> to try and get a consensus on some of them (and hopefully get at least a
> few applied)
> 
> So, in no particular order, the big patches are:
> 
> *Notes support for info pages (bug #343524) [1]
> *Notes are supposed to act like hyperlinks for info files.  The patch
> makes them into actual hyperlinks.  Works for me.  I'd like to see
> committed.

Seems right to me.  I'll trust your judgment on this.

> Translated man pages (bug #343275) [2]
> Don't really know the man page stuff, but looks good from the screenies
> smitten showed a bit ago.

We definitely want this working, and I trust Brent's judgment on this.

> New look TOC (bug #337584) [3]
> I'd definitely like to see a new look TOC added.  Patch needs a bit of
> work though and the categories would really need re-thunk

Categorization is hard.  And it's made all the harder by the fact
that the last thing people want to see when they open Yelp is a
list of categories to browse through.

I'd really love to see the categorization of other documents mixed
into an informative root document, possibly the User Guide.  But
then, for that root document to be useful to most users, it needs
to be pluggable by distros.  And that leads me back to Mallard,
which causes me to stall.

> DBUS activation (bug #337540) [4]
> Kill Bonobo activation in favour of DBUS.  Seems to be the way the wind
> is swaying.  chpe thinks this may not be the best idea (after epiphany
> switched to dbus activation).  It would allow (in future) us to provide
> dbus signals for other applications to load help files and do our part
> for the die-libgnome-die campaign

I'm all for doing this.  What problems did chpe encounter?

> Section auto-expanding (bug #167070) [5]
> The list of sections on the left.  Should it auto-expand?  Been brought
> up several times on usability list, resulting in the consensus: "Up to
> you.".  Personally, I think the patch should be applied.  It feels
> somewhat more natural to use.

I am completely indifferent to this.  I think auto-expanding
avoids extra clicks, but I suppose it all depends on how you're
browsing and reading.  And we just don't have any concrete user
studies.  Auto-expanding might be surprising, and it might have
a negative accessibility impact.

So yeah, go ahead with this.

> Recently Viewed List (bug #67966) [6]
> Adds deep histories allowing people to skip back > 1 page at a time.
> smitten thinks it needs more work to add little icons to each entry
> showing the type of file.  At the moment (IIRC) it uses the title from
> the window.  Probably not the best idea, but...

Let's get this in, and then open bugs for any improvements
we'd like to make on it.

> There we go.  That's the big patches (or at least the ones I'd like to
> see closed).  So, any comments on any of the above (or any other patch
> in bugzilla)?

Thanks, Don.

--
Shaun