Status of the Ubuntu Docs in Natty

[Shaun McCance]

On Mon, 2011-02-28 at 13:24 +0100, David Planella wrote:
> El dv 25 de 02 de 2011 a les 15:20 -0500, en/na Shaun McCance va
> escriure:
> > 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.
> > 
> 
> Hey Shaun,
> 
> I seem to remember it was the new topic-based help. I can no longer see
> it due to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/yelp/+bug/726490
> (not reported upstream yet, I want to make sure it's not a distro bug
> first).

That really looks to me like the document isn't installed. What
version of gnome-user-docs do you have installed? Do you have
any .page files under /usr/share/gnome/help/gnome-help/C/ ?

> Regarding translations, what's the reason for them not being available?
> Can yelp not yet translate them, or are the translatable messages not
> yet exposed for translation, or is there any other reason?

That's a good question. I'd just assumed it was because nobody
had done any translations yet. But looking at the GNOME l10n
status pages, I don't see gnome-user-docs listed. I'll ping
gnome-i18n and let them know.

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

> Thanks a lot for the detailed analysis and for presenting the options.
> Would anyone from the Ubuntu Docs team like to comment on these to bring
> this forward?

I should also mention (4). I've been working on splitting Yelp's
core document processing into a separate library called libyelp.
At the moment, it's just part of the yelp module, but it will be
split off eventually.

This is probably not an option for the next release, but going
forward, Ubuntu could build its own help viewer based on libyelp.
A custom viewer could be much more integrated with Unity. It's
conceivable that GNOME might do something similar in the future,
making help feel more like part of the shell than an application.

To make this seamless to applications, we'll need to decide on
some generic DBus methods to invoke help, and get applications
to start using those instead of execing Yelp. This should go
to freedesktop.org, and we should get other desktops involved.

--
Shaun