Re: Help suckage for GNOME2 ..continued

[Mikael Hallendal <micke codefactory se>]

tis 2002-03-26 klockan 09.07 skrev satyajit kanungo:
>   Hi  All

Hi!

Great to see that someone looks into this.

Wouldn't the easiest solution be to as Satyajit suggests, let the
applications just have one entry in there Help-menu that fire's up Yelp
with the Content-view up showing the help document for that application.

I think it's a little stupid that libgnome should parse the
scrollkeeper-data too. Or if it should, the scrollkeeper-parsing should
be moved into libgnome and Yelp should be calling functions in libgnome
to get the Content-tree (a little late for this move of functionality
perhaps). But I think that might be a nice solution, since letting all
help browsers parse the scrollkeeper-data directly is imho a bad
solution.

For GNOME 2.0 I think the best solution will be to just let the
applications do a gnome_help_display ("ghelp:application"); (doesn't
remember the exact syntax).

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

>   Help is not working at all for GNOME2 (for almost all application).
>   There is already   a bug (ID 73312) is present against this in bugzilla. 
>   I have analyzed the issue  and following things can be done to resolve it .
> 
>   Currently all the applications use GNOMEUIINFO_HELP to show the help topics.
>   GNOMEUIINFO_HELP is broken on GNOME2  and applications using this macro 
>   are not able to show the help topics .  The issue can be resolved in following ways
> 
> 
>   1. As Yelp is now the default browser for GNOME2,  applications can use Yelp
>      to show the help files . Instead of having various .html files for different 
>      help topics,  applications shall have a single .xml file which will be fired 
>      by Yelp. 
> 
>      For this  GNOMEUIINFO_HELP needs to be changed in libgnomeui .
>      In stead of parsing the TOC file and getting the help topics , libgnomeui
>      shall create a menu item ("Contents" or "Help Manual") and associate 
>      gnome_help_display() with it . Clicking on either "Contents" or "Help Manual"
>      shall fire yelp with the application's help file (.xml file).     
>     
>      The earlier way of handling the help topics (parsing of TOC file, creating menus
>      for each help topic ) can be put under a deprecated flag so that application can be 
>      compiled and brought up in 1.x way also . 
>      
>      Following this way,  no changes need to be done in applications and applications 
>      can continue only calling GNOMEUIINFO_HELP to show their help topics.
> 
>      The other way can be -  
> 
>       Application can create menus for help topics and associate gnome_help_display()
>       with each of them,  which will fire Yelp with the help file (.xml file) . 
>       (the way gedit does it on GNOME2.0 )
>       In this case all the applications need to  be modified to incorporate this change.
>       
> 
>   2. One more solution can be 
>      The issues with GNOMEUIINFO_HELP (failing of scrollkeeper-get-toc-from-docpath,
>      xmlParseFile etc )   can be fixed in libgnomeui.  
> 
>      But in this case libgnomeui  shall be using scrollkeeper and has to parse   
>      TOC-files (the 1.4 way of  doing the things ) .Also all the application need to
>      retain their old (1.x) help files   (index.html and friends) . 
> 
>          
>     I hope this helps in  getting the help items working on GNOME 2. 
>     Expecting your comments on the best way of resolving the issue.
> 
>     Regards 
>     Satyajit
> 
> 
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Mikael Hallendal                micke codefactory se
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