Re: gnome-help (yelp) and info/manual pages

[Toralf Lund <toralf procaptura com>]

Shaun McCance wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-12-03 at 19:07 +0100, Toralf Lund wrote:
>  
>
> > After upgrading to Fedora Core 3 w/ GNOME 2.8, I can no longer use 
> > commands like
> >
> > yelp info:cat
> >
> > or
> >
> > gnome-help man:cat
> >
> > to display info or manual pages. Why?
> >    
>
> In Gnome 2.6, the document transformation system was changed in Yelp.
> This resulted in much faster and nicer DocBook conversions, which is
> Yelp's primary purpose.  The existing man and info converters weren't
> using the new transformation system, so they were disabled.
>  
Is this mentioned in the release notes???

> The number of people who have complained about this is staggeringly
> high.  Apparently, people want their man pages back more than they'd
> like something modern, like full search capabilities.
>  
Maybe people would rather have some (any) way to display the information 
actually on the system, than a modern way of accessing data that doesn't 
exist? I would guess that at least 90% of the documentation on a typical 
installation is in info or man-page format...

I also think making it "modern" is not a good design goal, but maybe I 
put too much meaning in your choise of words. I mean, I want something 
that *works*; I don't care what the current fashion is...

> At the current rate of development, it's likely that man pages will be
> enabled for 2.10, but info probably will not.
I would much rather have it the other way around. Man pages can easily 
be displayed in many other ways, but I don't really have a good info 
browser besides the gnome-help system (the console info app is a lot 
more cumbersome to use, and so is the emacs interface.)

>  Of course, this is all
> contingent on how much further work goes into both before the freeze.
> As a rule, I don't make feature promises.
>
> --
> Shaun
>
>
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