To Require yelp or not to require yelp

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Mon Jun 11 17:23:11 UTC 2007


On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 11:26 -0400, Ray Strode wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > > 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.
> > The virtual provides idea sounds reasonable to me.  Would probably
> > help olpc out.
> 
> Actually, I talked with Matthias a bit more about this, and we came to
> a slightly different conclusion than before.
> 
> The gnome_help APIs already have a mechanism for putting up a dialog
> saying "help not available" or some such that apps should (and mostly
> do) take advantage of.

Great!  Does the API work with gnomeuiinfo or uimanager?  (I'm packaging
an old app that uses gnomeuiinfo and the menu system does not give an
error when yelp is not installed.  I can propose a port to uimanager to
upstream if there's a way to get at the error there.)

> We already include yelp in comps.  If the user wants to explicitly
> remove yelp to regain some space or whatever, that seems like an okay
> thing to do.  If we put the virtual provides/requires in then the user
> would have to get some stub package to be able to cleanly drop yelp.
> 
> It doesn't matter a whole lot either way, but I guess if we think
> about help as an optional feature, then we shouldn't put the Requires
> in libgnomeui.

I agree that the provides is less than ideal.  If there's another way to
find out there's a problem displaying help I'll work with that.

BTW, I was wrong about the mime-type in the .desktop file being the key
for selecting the application to use.  gnome-help which is a symlink to
yelp is referenced from a gconf key::
  /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/ghelp/command

-Toshio
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