Do we need a documentation application?

[Eric H. Christensen]

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On Sun, Apr 03, 2011 at 11:09:29AM -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
> 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

Are these coming from the standards from the opendesktop group?

> 
> 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.

That doesn't seem to be extremely helpful...

> 
> 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.

I'd create a Documentation category before putting the RNs (and other docs) in with programs.

> 
> 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.

This seems less than useful.  Why the break in the standard .desktop file?

> 
> 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.

Oh boy...  An application and going back to the way we used to do it seems to be not the way forward, IMO.  I feel as if Docs won't have much of a presence on F15 with all the changes forthcoming.  Perhaps we'll have our act together by F16.

What work is required for building, and pushing, a Documentation category?  How will the documentation be rendered?

- --Eric
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