Re: nautilus help system

[Ali Abdin <ALIABDIN aucegypt edu>]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Mathieu Lacage wrote:

> hi all,
> 
> 
> been working lately on integrating the nautilus user manual in nautilus 
> help viewer.
> 
> I could not find anything describing the way the files are supposed to 
> be installed on the system.
> 
> here are my guesses:
> 
> let's say I installed gnome-libs in /gnome
> /gnome/share/gnome/help/nautilus/C would contain the manual for nautilus in english
> /gnome/share/gnome/help/nautilus/fr would contain the manual for nautilus in french.
>

This is absolutely correct. The docs /must/ be installed correctly for 
the locale. If they are not then that is a bug with the application 
(Havoc's book clearly states that docs should go into the appropriate 
locale place).

If you install the SGML or XML file it /must/ be the same name of the dir 
- i.e. nautilus.sgml or nautilus.xml (depending on whether you use 
DocBook XML or DocBook SGML).

If you do not have the XML or SGML it will automatically look for 
index.html
 
> As far as I can tell, no application is using the above scheme but they are using 
> the folowing one:
> /gnome/share/gnome/help/nautilus/ would contain the manual for nautilus

Which applications? The ones I know of install the docs in the correct 
place.
 
> There is no notion of localization at all.

There should be.

> The help viewer is currently constantly crashing at me for no good reason and I
> am trying to fix it before proceeding further. 

mathieu - this really doesn't help me. Could you provide me with a 
backtrace or some more debugging help (i.e. how can I look into this 
without any info).

Oh - by the way, I think I know why it is crashing. There is a 
'hardcoded' timeout of 10 seconds for components to load up (or something 
like that). Somebody put an assertion there for the time being in order 
to find out why the components would time out (or something like that). 
This seems to only affect the Help component (when using mozilla).

You can 'verify' that the doc is "okay" by doing a 'gnome-db2html2 
/path/to/nautilus.sgml'. If gnome-db2html2 doesn't crash - then its 
something in Nautilus

> If someone could just tell me where i am supposed to install the files, I would 
> be more than happy.

See above. We use the functions in gnome-help.c (found in gnome-libs) so 
it is pretty much the 'GNOME' standard (it looks for the appropriate doc 
in the locale, if not found it defaults to the doc in the 'C' locale). We 
are not creating our own doc installation 'policy'. 

Regards,
Ali