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

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 10:00 +0100, Toralf Lund wrote:
> 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???

Did you look?

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2003-
December/msg00008.html

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2003-
December/msg00041.html

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2004-
January/msg00047.html

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2004-
March/msg00109.html

This has been discussed to death in every web forum, mailing list, IRC
channel, newsgroup, barber shop, and coffee house on our planet and
others.

> >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...

The primary design goal of Yelp is to allow you to view the help files
for the graphical programs you run on your desktop.  Anything else is
just pudding.

Why aren't you complaining to the maintainers of man that it can't view
the DocBook files that Gnome installs?

> 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...

It's not about buzzword-compliance.  It's about providing truly useful
features.  Searching is useful to everybody.  It's useful to you, it's
useful to me, it's useful to my mother.  Man pages are useful to you.

> >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.)

Then I suggest you either open emacs and start hacking, or vote for info
pages.  I am a volunteer.  I put in a lot of time as a volunteer.  But
there is absolutely no way that I alone can do everything in time for
2.10.  It's simply not possible.

--
Shaun

VOTE:
http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/wishlist.html