possible documentation viewer?

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Sean Wheller wrote:

>Yes, but it only supports on-the-fly transformation of xml that conforms to 
>the GNOME requirements. For ubuntu-doc purposes Yelp does not support a 
>mountain of things and is not easily customizable. As a result we will be 
>transforming to X/HTML a format supported by Yelp and KHelpcenter, but we 
>will support viewing under any web browser.
>  
>
OK, I'm going to jump in here with some questions: Does the Ubuntu and
Kubuntu help content live in the same package, and if so can we split it
up? It sounds sensible to generate Ubuntu help files from DocBook that
work well in Ubuntu's native Yelp and also generate
KHelpcenter-compatible XML files that can be included as a separate
package in Kubuntu. A third process would generate pure HTML files that
we can put on the web. That's the advantage of DocBook right?, that once
you have the content in that format you can quite easily export it in a
number of ways.

I agree with Jeff that the best way to improve and expand Yelp (if that
is indeed needed) is to suggest changes to the upstream people (or
submit patches).

>So what we will be packaging with the distro is the X/HTML web-based 
>application. 
>
Which application? Does this exist or is it vapor-ware? Firefox is too
complex and takes too long to load just to display help files. The spec
writing for breezy was done at UDU and implementation is well under way,
so it's really too late to suggest new applications. The balance of
applications in Ubuntu is carefully constructed based on many factors
(useability, upstream support, stability, etc.) We cannot simply add
applications at a whim.

Yelp seems to have worked well in Hoary and the Ubuntu developers (who
decide what packages go in) are going forward with that. As the doc team
we should provide documentation for the platform that is available. If
you have serious grievances about the functionality of Yelp, I would
suggest that you write those up in some detail and present them to the
Yelp team and perhaps suggest it as bounty work for Breezy+1.

- Henrik