Re: About GNOME / return / duck related question

[Don Scorgie <DonScorgie Blueyonder co uk>]

Hi,

On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 12:37 +0100, karderio wrote:
> Hi :o)
> 
> On Mon, 2006-12-18 at 10:36 +0000, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> > --- Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com> wrote:
> > > Good on-screen help has "Show Me" buttons.
> > 
> > I was just thinking about that.
> > Does Yelp currently support anything like that -- a
> > button that says "Open Thingy Preferences" for example?
> 
> This could be achieved with Dogtail and accessibility. It could perhaps
> be kludged with yelp as it is, a patch to get this to work properly
> shouldn't be hard though.

This could indeed be kludged into the current yelp, though we'd have to
abuse docbook somewhat.  Better to get it into Mallard (or at least a
skeleton for future work on it).

> 
> The whole system to support automation is rather unstable at the moment,
> I really don't think it is ready for this sort of thing yet. I think a
> first step towards this for the GDP would be to use automation to get
> screenshots for each language with the latest theme, if that can be made
> to work it would be a start.

Indeed, this comes up every ~ 2 months or so.  What's needed is for
someone to sit down and do a proper example for one of the (simpler)
manuals.  I've got no experience with dogtail, am "currently between
jobs" [1] and am still bogged down in other projects [2], so it probably
won't come from me ;)  Once that's done (preferably documenting the
process for those that follow), we can integrate the procedure into the
doc writing process.

> 
> Currently we have no docs, and we have an ageing system that says how to
> write them that needs replacing. I think this sort of discussion may be
> best left until after we have done these things.

Disagree.  If we're going to add this, we should have at least an idea
of how it'd be done within Mallard Markup.  Adding it later would
probably cause much more pain.  Even if it's just a hook and figure out
the details later, it should be discussed now and added to the
underlying language at the start, as opposed to shoehorning it in later.

Don
[1] Which is consuming many of my hours
[2] Spoon, Yelp and Labyrinth.  Currently not getting much done on
any :(