Help button in Fedora

[Paul W. Frields]

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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