On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 08:49:18AM -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 07:10 -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
> Yelp is basically a document display application. It has the great
> advantage of being very bright about localization. We currently display the
> release notes and "About Fedora" in yelp.
>
> Unfortunately, yelp is a Gnome application, and the KDE crowd
> dislikes it. There is a KDE analog, but it seems to be abused
> rather than used. There is so much junk in it that it is
> impossible to find anything, and what is there seems to be mostly
> useless. Much of what you describe in the Ubuntu help is in the
> Fedora User's Guide, which will probably be getting a higher
> profile now that it is up to date.
>
> Personally, I like yelp and would like to see it used more
> effectively. But for the practical reason of trying to be desktop
> neutral, I would expect our use of yelp to decline rather than
> increase.
If you ask me, that so called 'desktop neutrality' is exactly what
makes the Fedora offerings in this area so much inferior to Ubuntu.
What Andrew was asking for is to make the Help button show useful
task-oriented documentation. In the default installation, that Help
button brings up Yelp. So, if you want your documents to be found by
the majority of users that need them, this is exactly where they
should be: Behind the help button, in yelp.
How others abuse the khelpcenter shouldn't be our concern, as long as
we're providing clearly available docs there. (I wrote KDE
desktop-specific entries for this in the past release notes that might
be useful to someone at some point.)
My personal opinion is that we should be using Yelp *more* than we do.
If you want to see some cool stuff, look up the GNOME Project Mallard
to see the future of task-based documentation, which (I believe) will
Yelp will be capable of presenting. How can we reconcile those
advances with the use of Publican in Fedora Docs?
http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/mallard/index.html
--
Paul W. Frields
http://paul.frields.org/
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