To Require yelp or not to require yelp

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 01:01 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Ville Skyttä (ville.skytta at iki.fi) said: 
> > > You'd still need the gnome libraries which should pull in the right stuff.
> > 
> > yelp comes with a dependency chain.  In the case of dia, adding a dependency 
> > on yelp (whether directly or indirectly if the dep is in some gnome lib 
> > packages), that right stuff would result in the need to additionally install 
> > yelp, desktop-file-utils, docbook-dtds, fedora-bookmarks, firefox, 
> > gnome-doc-utils, libXt, libbeagle, nspr, nss, openjade, opensp, scrollkeeper, 
> > sgml-common, and xml-common.
> 
> Surely this is a function call in a common gnome library? gnome_show_help,
> or whatever?
> 
> Then, that library should require yelp. Of course, I suppose the app
> it launches with the help URL is configurable via gconf, so the requires
> needs dynamically generated based on the union of all users' current
> gconf keys and AAAAARGH.
> 
I was notified of this for one of my packages via Matej's script.  After
talking to people on fedora-desktop I opened this bug against
libgnomeui::
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=243478

The recommendation there is to have libgnomeui depend on yelp.  Creating
a virtual provide of HelpBrowser or DocbookXmlViewer in yelp and having
libgnomeui require that might work even better.

In addition, I spent a little time tracing the code to see what was
happening.  There is an API in libgnomeui for help that calls an API in
libgnome.  The API in libgnome is (I suspect) what is called from most
programs.  The API uses gnome-vfs2 to invoke a program that can display
documents of mime-type application/docbook+xml.  yelp is registered for
this document type (MimeType=application/docbook+xml in
the /usr/share/applications/gnome-yelp.desktop file)

I suspect (but have not tried) that a KDE desktop that has a program to
display application/docbook+xml would not need yelp installed to display
help in a gnome program.

-Toshio
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