Upcoming UI changes for UNR: Customizing Yelp's Home Page

[Shaun McCance]

On Wed, 2009-09-16 at 15:22 +0100, Phil Bull wrote:
> Hi Shaun,
> 
> On Tue, 2009-09-15 at 18:01 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > The single most compelling feature of Mallard is that you can
> > drop pages into a document and have links to them appear from
> > other pages in the document.  I don't see how we can possibly
> > do this without any run-time processing.
> 
> This can't be done at build time, but it could be done at install time
> if pages are only expected to be changed/added when packages are
> installed or updated. The package manager could just call a handler
> which rebuilds the relevant part of the HTML cache once it's finished
> installing packages.
> 
> Otherwise, something involving inotify could work.

It's possible.  You don't want the HTML files to be shipped
by (and thus owned by) any package, since rewriting a file
belonging to a package is bad news.  So this would be some
sort of post-install hook to generate an HTML cache.

This really does limit my ability to improve things in Yelp,
since rendering changes would then have to be done in the
pregeneration tool, and that would have to be run against
all installed documents.  And it makes it considerably more
difficult for us to pick up locally overridden files in
XDG_DATA_HOME, e.g. in response to web updates.

(Yes, I'm talking about features we don't have yet.  But
these are features the documentation team has been talking
about for years, and I designed Mallard to support them.)

> > The performance issues in Yelp are, by and large, not a result
> > of the XSLT.  They're mostly a result of excessive or poorly
> > executed disk access.  If anybody wants to talk about this,
> > the correct place to do it would be upstream.
> 
> It would be good to take a look at this. Should we discuss on
> gnome-doc-list?

Technical nitty-gritty should go on gnome-doc-devel-list.
I don't use it much these days, because I'm the only one
hacking on things right now, and I don't like talking to
myself. ;-)

--
Shaun