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GNOME Love Day

Submitted by shaunm on Mon, 2004-11-15 15:18. GNOME
GNOME

Sunday, November 21st is a very special GNOME love day dedicated to spreading the love for Yelp, GNOME's own rocking help browser. Our freindly and experienced hackers will be on hand to help bring new developers up to speed.

Development on the 2.9.x series has been rapid, and there are plenty of tasks suitable for new developers. Here's a partial list of the fun and excitement you can expect:

- Polish the man page converter
- Implement bookmarks
- Implement multi-level history
- Implement title pages and cover pages
- Make the contents pages prettier
- Dig into accessibility issues

Also, Danilo Šegan and Shaun McCance will be on hand for work on xml2po and gnome-doc-utils. We'll attempt to switch some projects over to using the new documentation build utilities, documenting our adventures and fixing the tools as needed. People who know python, XSLT, shell, make, or autotools can find plenty to do on Sunday.

The love begins on November 21st at 10:00AM CST and will continue to 9:00PM CST, or whenever I fall asleep. That's 16:00 UTC to 03:00 UTC. Join us on IRC in #gnome-love.

And remember, every day is a good day for GNOME love. Whether you want to hack Yelp or not, whether you can make it out on Sunday or not, you can always come to #gnome-love to get started.

See the thread on gnome-love@gnome.org for more information.

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Confused...

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2004-11-22 03:00.

Dear Yelp Lovers: (I'm not one of the previous posters, but since you're interested in feedback...)

Yelp is really neat. I love how, when I have my "writing documentation" hat on, I can write raw DocBook/XML, and view it directly, without having to muck with the normal DocBook toolchain. It's really awsome at that.

But when I have my "searching for help" hat on, Yelp drives me crazy. The interface feels like it's violating a bunch of invariants I expect to be maintained.

For example, when Yelp starts, it's like a normal web browser in a Yahoo-like directory, with no location bar or breadcrumbs or anything to indicate where I am. (Am I in the toplevel? 1 level down? What's 'up' from here? Did I already try looking under that link?) The toplevel categories (Desktop, Applications, Development, System) don't make sense to me: I have no idea where the Desktop ends and Applications begin. I just want help with this Desktop Application that came with my System! I feel lost.

Some links don't lead to other directories: they lead to DocBook manuals (even though the links look the same). Then the whole window turns from "web browser in a (blind) Yahoo-like directory" into "DocBook browser, with a table-of-contents on the side". It's very disorienting, at the one time when I especially want things to be stable and consistent.

Don't get me wrong: Yelp is cool, it's getting significantly better with each release, and I want it to succeed. I just think that since you've got the performance pretty much nailed, and the DocBook rendering works great, one of the next big things it needs is a designer to give the high-level interface some love.

For comparison, the Mac OS Help Viewer makes sense to me: it feels stable, consistent, and comfortable. The sidebar is always visible (unless you explicitly hide it, yourself), and always lists every manual that's available. It's in a "tree", but with only 2 levels, and 2 top-level branches, so it's essentially just split into 2 lists: Documentation, and Developer Documentation. I never have any trouble finding what I want quickly.

(I hope that makes sense, and is semi-constructive. Sorry I couldn't help with the Love on Sunday -- I was busy with Life.)

Which IRC Network?

Submitted by pixelcort on Wed, 2004-11-17 23:47.

#gnome-love on which IRC network?

RE: Which IRC Network?

Submitted by shaunm on Thu, 2004-11-18 01:16.

Sorry, that's on GIMPNet. Try irc.gnome.org.

OT: FDO

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2004-11-16 12:00.

What happened to freedesktop.org? I haven't been able to get there since Saturday, did they have scheduled down time? Or are they having problems, or under attack?

freedesktop.org has been compromised

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2004-11-16 12:07.

freedesktop.org has been compromised. See http://www.livejournal.com/~fooishbar/

darn, I was hoping to downloa

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2004-11-16 13:34.

darn, I was hoping to download the transparent xterm, I finally found its location, and its down.

Still they found out according to this within 30 hours. Thats not too shabby.

"freindly"? by Anonymous George

RE: "freindly"?

Submitted by shaunm on Tue, 2004-11-16 14:01.

Better yet, how about a project to make the English language make sense? ;-)

Necessary

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2004-11-16 07:53.

As can be seen on SUSE 9.2 and Novell Linux Desktop: The GNOME applications start khelpcenter to display their delp.

Necessary

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2004-11-16 07:53.

As can be seen on SUSE 9.2 and Novell Linux Desktop: The GNOME applications start khelpcenter to display their delp.

Proposal for yelp

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2004-11-16 05:10.

Here are my proposal:
+ Keyword Summary Tab
+ Have an Help logo in About
+ Unified Navigation Bar in HTML Document
+ Have 'Select All' in Edit
+ Tab View Help, similar to Tab Window of FireFox

RE: Proposal for yelp

Submitted by shaunm on Wed, 2004-11-17 16:55.


+ Have an Help logo in About

Yeah, not a big deal, really.

+ Keyword Summary Tab
+ Unified Navigation Bar in HTML Document

Not sure what you mean by these.

+ Have 'Select All' in Edit

Already in CVS, much thanks to James Bowes.

+ Tab View Help, similar to Tab Window of FireFox

I don't really think this is necessary. I'm trying to avoid presenting Yelp as a big featured application. Rather, it's a utility window that you want to spend as little time in as possible. I could be bribed^Wconvinced, though, given a sufficient number of CDs.

Great Idea...

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2004-11-15 16:32.

The current Gnome help system is not very usable by most, I think... having something more professional/usable would be a giant leap forward.

Based on what version of Gnom

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2004-11-15 17:16.

Based on what version of Gnome?

I highly doubt you are talking about 2.6 or 2.8

RE: Great Idea...

Submitted by shaunm on Mon, 2004-11-15 16:48.

That comment isn't very useful. A more useful thing would be to say what's missing, and why you think it's important. This would be a useful comment: “The lack of search functionality makes it difficult to find the information you need.” So would this: “Having to look in half a dozen places for documentation is frustrating. We really need a unified help system that can be used by all desktops, applications, and vendors.”

These things are on the drawing board. If you have something else that you think is important for help systems, please tell us.

may be... but it's true

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2004-11-16 10:42.

Sorry to play the down guy, but I agree with his comments.

On my computer Yelp open a window with 4 hyperlink Desktop, Applications (link to nothing), etc.. with few or not information at all behind. No information on any command line instructions, nor any applications I have installed. So I return the question, what yelp is there for ?

Devhelp works good and looks nice but only for developper docs.

So yes, of course, yelp should show man pages, should have search function, should list applications installed documentation... I saw screenshot (below), that's nice. But that should have been in yelp 1.0.

Sorry for the rant, but I tried to write docs for my own application and it was such nightmare to understand the Gnome doc system and find any coherent help that I gave up. Now I do html files, and I tell people to browse them !

RE: may be... but it's true

Submitted by shaunm on Tue, 2004-11-16 13:11.

Sorry to play the down guy, but I agree with his comments.

I wasn't saying there aren't problems. I was saying that I can't fix problems if I don't know what they are. Telling me Yelp sucks isn't useful. Telling me why Yelp sucks is.

On my computer Yelp open a window with 4 hyperlink Desktop, applications (link to nothing), etc.. with few or not information at all behind. No information on any command line instructions, nor any applications I have installed. So I return the question, what yelp is there for ?

Yelp is there to view the help files that others install. Yelp isn't responsible for the content of the help files any more than Mozilla is responsible for the content of the web. The categorization isn't as good as it could be, and we'll be addressing that.

So yes, of course, yelp should show man pages, should have search function, should list applications installed documentation... I saw screenshot (below), that's nice. But that should have been in yelp 1.0.

Man page functionality was there from the beginning. It was removed in 2.6 for various reasons. People wanted it back, apparently more than they wanted search or print or other modern functionality.

Sorry for the rant, but I tried to write docs for my own application and it was such nightmare to understand the Gnome doc system and find any coherent help that I gave up. Now I do html files, and I tell people to browse them !

Did you talk to the documentation team? Did you file bugs? Did you talk to me?

Look, I know the help system isn't the most pleasant thing to deal with, and I've been addressing that. But it's not that hard. Compared to the stuff you've probably learned to write a solid application, writing a DocBook file and giving it to ScrollKeeper is a piece of cake.

You should not consider only

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2004-11-15 17:18.

You should not consider only one point here. For exaple, the developers documentation, like man(3) pages should be accessible only to developers, not users. That's rather complex question.

I personally think that alt-f

Submitted by Twigman on Mon, 2004-11-15 20:38.

I personally think that alt-f2 > man://ls should bring up the ls manual page in the lovely yelp.

Btw.. yelp is great guys.. can't wait to see it in 2.10

Oh yeah! which version of yel

Submitted by Twigman on Wed, 2004-11-17 00:03.

Oh yeah! which version of yelp is that? I'm using the one in ubuntu (2.6.4)

RE: Oh yeah! which version of yelp

Submitted by shaunm on Wed, 2004-11-17 14:56.

CVS HEAD, with big thanks to James Bowes.

Good stuff.. I don't think I

Submitted by Twigman on Wed, 2004-11-17 20:58.

Good stuff.. I don't think I will use the man page browser often anyway but I may just have to get this because it's cool.

Do info:// pages work as well in this version?

GNU info

Submitted by shaunm on Thu, 2004-11-18 01:18.

Sorry, no info pages yet. There's still a chance we could get it for 2.10, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Actually, we should probably

Submitted by danilo on Thu, 2004-11-18 08:00.

Actually, we should probably ask of system distributors to use "makeinfo --docbook" to produce DocBook documents instead of .info files, which would be readable by Yelp. TeXinfo format is very much like DocBook, just with different syntax. "info" format is oriented towards textual terminals, and it doesn't support many things TeXinfo does (or it does in latest versions, with non-standalone readers such as Emacs CVS; for the record, I'm thinking of image support :).

Though, I'm not really sure how practical this would be (i.e. can we convince distributors to do that?).