Re: Yelp, Scrollkeeper, rarian, Help System Spec status

[Don Scorgie <Don Scorgie org>]

Hi,

On Sun, 2008-07-27 at 21:20 +0400, Dmitry Dzhus wrote:
> Recently I wanted to test a russian translation for some GNOME Package.
> I've generated a bunch of translated xml files with `xml2po(1)` and then
> got really stuck trying to figure out how these docs should be installed
> into Yelp. Just copying them to `/usr/share/gnome/help/ru` did not help.
> 
> After I had spent some time digging through the Yelp code and reading
> wikis, I've come to the following conclusions:
> 
> 1. Scrollkeper used to be the librarian engine for Yelp. Scrollkeeper
>    OMF files provided Yelp information about various manuals installed
>    in the system.

Indeed.

> 
> 2. Scrollkeeper sucks and has now been superseded by Rarian.

Correct.

> 
> 3. Rarian aims to use fd.o help files spec, but right now it still deals
>    with OMF files. Yelp uses OMFs to show help topics as well.
> 
> Am I right?

That's about it.  Although rarian also has it's own meta-data format.

> 
> What is the status of `.document` files described in «Help System
> Specification»? Will they be used some day?

They will be used some day.  At the minimum, when Mallard finally gets
in shape, the new meta-data format is needed for some aspects.

> 
> Eventually I plugged my translation to Yelp using such file in a local
> dir. It would be nice to dump OMF in favor of `.document` files.

Indeed.  However, there are still some unresolved issues before we can
actually use it (validation tool in rarian package, proper integration
into gnome-doc-utils), but these things will (hopefully) appear at some
point.

As for the original problem, you can add "ru" to "DOC_LINGUAS" entity in
the Makefile.am and install the package as usual [1]

Hope this helps
Don

[1] Provided the package is using gnome-doc-utils for it's
documentation.