Status of the Ubuntu Docs in Natty

[Shaun McCance]

On Fri, 2011-02-25 at 20:46 +0100, David Planella wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been checking out the yelp version in Natty this week, and apart
> from watching in awe the increase in speed, I've also been wondering
> about the status of the Ubuntu docs and their translations, especially
> after the discussions regarding the project direction a few weeks ago.
> 
> I've noticed that there isn't any front page for the Ubuntu docs yet,
> and that currently launching yelp shows the GNOME desktop guide in
> English (I'll have to investigate why this happens, I suspect it might
> be a problem on the translations packaging or importing side).

Are you referring to the new topic-based help ("Desktop Help")
or the old user guide ("Desktop User Guide")? The default was
changed pretty recently, and I'm not sure what build of Yelp
you're using.

If it's the topic-based help, there are no translations right
now. So that would explain why you're seeing English. Otherwise,
if there's a problem with the localized document lookup, please
let me know. That would be a very critical bug.

As for the Ubuntu docs being the front page, the idea was that
the Desktop Help would just be able to be that for all distros,
and that extra pages could be added when it makes sense. That
was a really good plan a year ago. But just as we finally got
the technical bits in place, Ubuntu is switching to Unity as
a default desktop. So the GNOME Desktop Help is probably not
going to be a good base document.

Ubuntu is probably going to need its own main help document,
as it's had in the past. Let's figure out how to best make
that work.

1) Ubuntu could just ensure that, in every bit of code that
wants to display the desktop help, Yelp is called with a URI.

  Pro: no patching to Yelp.
  Con: Some code somewhere might get missed.

2) Ubuntu could patch Yelp to have a different default URI.
I think this is what's been done in the past. It could be a
good patch. Or I could make the default document a setting,
and it could be a schema patch. It's a patch either way.

  Pro: pretty straight-forward.
  Con: Yelp will still load the Unity-based desktop help
  for users who choose to download stock GNOME.

3) Yelp could have some desktop detection, and choose the
default URI accordingly. There's no standard way to find
this information. There've been sporadic xdg-list threads
on the topic. It's always shot down. We might be able to
do some sort of process or service detection.

  Pro: paves the way for Yelp to be used as-is to serve
  other desktops.
  Con: probably only ever going to be 90% accurate.

My priority is making sure that people get accurate and
useful help, regardless of what desktop or distro they're
running. So whatever it takes to make that happen, that's
what I'll do.

Thanks,
Shaun