Ubuntu Help compared with other help systems

[Don Scorgie]

On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 18:03 +0100, Dean Sas wrote:
<snip>
> 
> The version in Dapper allows you to search, however it pulls up all
> those nasty man pages in the results.

... and yet there are two current (upstream) bugs.  The first is asking
for man pages to be given a better ranking in the search results.  The
other is (basically) saying that including man pages in search results
is useless.

Currently, the man pages are relegated to the lowest-of-the-low search
results, just ahead of the info page results.

> 
> I agree with you in general, I think that having the Ubuntu specific
> documents on top would be better - particularly as they're probably
> after info that's only easy to find in there. Codecs, windows
> partitions, using your ipod etc.

It would probably be possible to cook up a relatively simple patch that
scans for Ubuntu specific docs (i.e. the desktop guide) when searching
and ups its search relevance (raising the page to the top of the search
results).

The non-beagleified search was added late in the GNOME release cycle
(the code landed a day before feature freeze).  Since then, we've been
working to improve it somewhat however its still quite immature.
Unfortunately, this isn't going to change substantially before Dapper's
release.  There are plans afoot to improve it substantially in the next
release cycle (i.e. for Dapper+1).

Don