Re: using gnome-help-caller

[Felix Bellaby <felix pooh u-net com>]

Mark Galassi writes:
 > 
 >     Felix> The Right Way to start the browser in the way you want is
 >     Felix> to use CORBA. This is what gnome-help-caller does
 >     Felix> internally.
 > 
 > Sure, but you always want to wrap things up in a simple routine that
 > calls CORBA for you.

Why ? (Oh dear, I am going to get religous here...)

CORBA is just as easy to use as any routines that you might wrap
around it. Adding wrappers for the sake of it is pure bloat.

The current GNOME/ORBit set up means that after initialising GNOME you 
can access a help browser using: 

  CORBA_Object browser =
    goad_server_activate_with_repo_id(0, 
	"IDL:help_browser/simple_browser:1.0",
	GOAD_ACTIVATE_REMOTE);

Then, the current help_browser IDL interface means that you can switch
urls using:

  help_browser_simple_browser_fetch_url(browser, ptr, &ev);

This only requires linking in libgnorba and building and linking 
in the client stubs from the IDL file. This is currently a bit of 
a pig to specify in the Makefile.am:

LDADD = <...> -lgnorba $(ORBIT_LIBS)

xyz_SOURCES = <...> $(ORBIT_GENERATED_SOURCES)

ORBIT_GENERATED_SOURCES = help-browser.h \
	help-browser-stubs.c help-browser-common.c
			      
$(ORBIT_GENERATED_SOURCES): $(idldir)/help-browser.idl $(ORBIT_IDL)
	$(ORBIT_IDL) $<

Hopefully automake will allow us to use "xyz_IDL=help-browser.idl"
or similar as a short hand at some point in the future.

Your proposed library would basically just contain the stubs that are
built using this Makefile.am stuff (ie help-browser-common.o and
help-browser-stubs.o) plus wrappers around those functions. Using
the proposed library would slightly alter the Makefile.am and change
the names of the routines in the source code so that they no longer
matched the names in the IDL. I do not see the point of doing this.

Miguel suggested that libgnomeui was using CORBA to access the help
browser already. This is not true at present and might raise problems
with library users who do not want to initialize CORBA. I would be 
happy to alter gnome_help_display (in libgnome) to use CORBA but does 
everyone want to do this ?

 > 
 >     Felix> BTW, Mark, are there any plans to develop stylesheets that
 >     Felix> convert DocBook into html for the gnome-help-browser in a
 >     Felix> consistent and distinctly "gnomey" way ?
 > 
 > That would be quite cute.  No plans yet.

There may not need to be any hugely complex steps involved in doing
this. How about dropping a copy of the Modular Docbook distribution 
into the gnome cvs ? Interested parties could then work on changing 
this DSSSL to make it more suitable.

This would bring the immediate benefit that everyone would be using
the same stylesheets to build their ghelp. This would allow everyone 
to patch and build any of the sgml/ghelp in cvs.

I guess there might be objections to using Modular DocBook as the 
starting point.... ?

Felix