Re: New member and Nautilus Help Browser

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2000 at 03:39:06PM +0100, Laszlo Kovacs wrote:

> 
> I work for the Sun Microsystems Desktop Engineering team and I would
> like to find out how can we contribute to the Nautilus Help Browser. 
> 
> We were told by Miguel that nobody is working on the help browsing and
> Eazel said they don't have resources for this. Later on I learnt from
> the first GDP status report that Ali Abdin is working on it.

Welcome. We're very excited to have you.

Ali Abdin is the primary hacker working on the help system. He can
give you a more detailed explanation of what we're up to, and what
help might be needed, but as he's on vacation this week I'll try to
give you a quick explanation of where we're at and where we're headed.

Ali's been working primarily on gnome-db2html2. Originally written by
Jonathan Blandford earlier this year, it converts docbook sgml files
on the fly to displayable html. All the GNOME docs are written in
docbook, and our current system involves package maintainers building
html when they build distribution packages of their software. Those
html's are then installed in the prefix/share/gnome/help/program_name
directories, and the old GNOME help browser just reads them as html.

The new system will instead read the docbook on the fly, converting it
for display as html in the Nautilus help browser window. That way only
the docbook file and images will need to be installed with the package.

Much of the work has been aimed at tuning up the html conversion in
gnome-db2html2 so it displays with grace and elegance, building tables
of contents, handling markup tags and links within the document well.

Since in the transition we will be dealing both with the new sgml
files and the old, already installed html files, we also need to make
sure the browser defaults to the old "index.html" file in the help
directory if the sgml is not there. Ali was working on this
before he left on vacation - it does not appear to be solved yet in my
cvs version or the preview release. 

There are some other issues involve info-2html display as well - see
the bug reports at bugzilla.eazel.com for a discussion of some of
those (An additional bug not yet reported involves info-2html spawning
a runaway process occasionally. I haven't filed a bug report yet
'cause I don't understand it well enough to explain it.)



> 
> What is docs@gnome.org? In the GDP Status Report it is pointed as the
> GDP mailing list. What is gnome-doc-list@gnome.org then?
> 

gnome-doc-list is our mailing list. I think docs@ is an alias that
forwards mail to the list?

-- 
John Fleck
jfleck@inkstain.net (h)
jfleck@abqjournal.com (w)
http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/
http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/