Objectives for Oneiric - Brainstorming

Matthew East mdke at ubuntu.com
Thu Apr 28 14:03:51 UTC 2011


On 28 April 2011 14:49, Kyle Nitzsche <kyle.nitzsche at canonical.com> wrote:
> On 04/28/2011 03:18 AM, Matthew East wrote:
>>
>> On 28 April 2011 00:42, Kyle Nitzsche<kyle.nitzsche at canonical.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On 04/27/2011 01:46 PM, Shaun McCance wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, 2011-04-27 at 10:38 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> • Move 11.04 docs to ubuntu-docs package
>>>>>  - the docs now in gnome-user-docs are customised so heavily that it
>>>>> is appropriate for them to be in a separate package, with yelp patched
>>>>> to open them by default.
>>>>>  - this would allow us to ship gnome-user-docs as a vanilla upstream
>>>>> release for those using gnome-shell.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks, this would be appreciated. Even if the Ubuntu help started
>>>> as a fork of gnome-user-docs, it really is a separate document and
>>>> it ought to have its own document ID.
>>>>
>>>> I would still like to have upstream Yelp be able to determine which
>>>> document to load based on what desktops it's running under. If Yelp
>>>> is just patched downstream, it will still show the Unity help by
>>>> default even when running under GNOME Shell.
>>>>
>>> Hi folks,
>>>
>>> I'd like to recommend that yelp consult gconf key to determine its home
>>> page/content. That makes it so easy to customize.
>>
>> I'm not sure that helps with the particular problem of showing a
>> different page depending on which desktop (Unity, Unity-2d,
>> gnome-shell, xfce, etc) the user has logged in with. Could a gconf key
>> exist that changes depending on this? Even if it could, would it be
>> the right thing to do?
>>
>
> Good point. If there isn't already one (and I haven't found one yet), I
> think there should be such a key. This would enable easily pointing yelp at
> the desired default help content, which greatly facilitates customization.

But is using gconf for something like this the right thing to do? It
would need to be changed on every login (I have no idea if that is
sound behaviour for a gconf key). Also, it assumes that the user is
running a "Gnome-based" desktop in the first place. I suppose that the
latter assumption is reasonably sound in the case of yelp at the
present time but perhaps we should also be thinking about catering for
other desktops in case there is adoption of yelp elsewhere.

> My goal is to enable customization without having to patch/fork yelp.
> Patching means giving up on new versions (or doing manual work to pick up
> latest changes).

I think that is always a valuable goal, provided that you have a nice
upstream like we do with yelp :)

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF




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