Do we need a documentation application?

John J. McDonough wb8rcr at arrl.net
Sun Apr 3 15:09:29 UTC 2011


In GNOME 3 the whole concept of menus is gone.  This means, among other
things, that there is no Documentation menu.  There are a number of
categories:

  Accessories
  Games
  Graphics
  Internet
  Office
  Others
  Sound & Video
  System Tools

There is also an 'All' category, but this only includes applications
that are in one of the other categories.  An application must be
specifically placed in the 'Other' category to appear there.

I could see putting the Release Notes in "System Tools", but it doesn't
seem to me that documentation in general belongs there.  Yelp is in
"Accessories", but that category is already cluttered, and I can see
"System Tools" getting pretty cluttered, too.

To further complicate the matter, previously GNOME, XFCE and LXDE could
all share a .desktop file.  It looks as if now a unique file will be
required for GNOME.

Were we to have some sort of Documentation application we could then
have something like update-desktop-database that would run on install.
This would allow us to have single-language RPMs and still maintain
consistent Fedora-like language behavior.  I can't say I'm really
thrilled with this, but it is an alternative.

Another alternative would be to go back to installing a separate set of
documentation for Yelp, and let it deal with all the GNOME weirdness.
Or, perhaps we can press shaunm to get Yelp working smoothly for html
documentation.  I have to admit I haven't played much with Yelp on
Fedora 15, and I know there has been substantial work done.

--McD




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