Re: Help API for GNOME 2.0

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 09:10:15PM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> > Umm .. I no longer have a machine with 32M of RAM to test this on
> > (I'm going to buy a cheap third-hand machine next week with limited
> > memory to play with for these purposes), but when I tried Nautilus
> > on such a box about three months ago it was unusable! I don't know
> > if the recent round of speed improvements have also improved the
> > memory requirements down to almost nothing, but it is completely
> > unacceptable for Gnome not to function on such machines.  Sure, you
> > have to turn all the bells and whistles off, but you shouldn't have
> > to turn the help files off.
> >
> > To my mind, _requiring_ Nautilus on such a machine would be shipping
> > with reduced functionality, since it rules out Gnome as an
> > alternative.
> 
> After chatting on #sun a bit this morning...  It sounds like all GNOME
> programs which use the component system are abysmally slow on Solaris.
> Apparantly Evolution even slower than Nautilus.  Since I see no
> fundamental reason why GNOME programs or the component system must be
> slower on Solaris than on Linux, I expect that it is just a matter of
> work to fix it.  And since GNOME isn't really GNOME without any of the
> apps which use the component system, I'm betting this problem will be
> fixed ;)
> 
> So, I'm going to start assuming that Nautilus will work alright on
> Solaris as our help browser and forget about the need for an HTML-only
> help browser unless people start making a lot of noise.

Ah, sorry .. I wasn't clear. I tested Nautilus on a 32M Celeron box
running Linux. I can spell Solaris, but that's about the limit of my
in-depth knowledge on those systems.

So, I'm still concerned if Nautilus is the only way to view stuff.

> > What is wrong with this?
> >       4) An HTML help browser can exist transparently if it does the
> > 	 following: converts XML helps files to HTML either on-demand or
> > 	 en masse (a cron job to keep up to date, perhaps). Then it sees
> > 	 every request for a help file and maps that to the appropriate
> > 	 HTML file. How it does this is up to the help browser.
> >
> > In this way, you can have Netscape/Mozilla/Galeon/FooBrowser/whatever as
> > your help browser, even, but there needs to be a wrapper app that is
> > what is called when help is required and it then makes the appropriate
> > call to Mozilla, etc as appropriate. In fact, one wrapper app fits all
> > here, since it's just a matter of changing which web browser it calls in
> > the final phase.
> 
> This sounds like #1, since you have to pull the code that converts XML
> to HTML out of Nautilus and put it into gnome-libs.

Yes, that's true. I think that's a necessary piece of surgery, in any
case, since XML -> HTML conversion on the fly is useful in more contexts
than just help systems.

Cheers,
Malcolm

-- 
I intend to live forever - so far so good.