Do we need a documentation application?

[Shaun McCance]

On Sun, 2011-04-03 at 13:30 -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-04-03 at 12:40 -0400, Eric H. Christensen wrote:
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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?
> 
> It is my understanding that these come from a new standard, but I
> haven't studied it.  These are the same categories we used to have on
> the Applications menu.

To my knowledge, there is no new standard, nor any deviation
from the existing standard. Desktop files have never specified
where they are in a hierarchy. They specify categories, and
desktops are free to organize things as they see fit based on
those categories.

The GNOME Shell developers have decided to do something a bit
different, showing all applications at once, and then having
a select few buttons to filter them. It's not a menu. And it's
perfectly in line with the flexibility built into the desktop
key file format.

> > > 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.
> 
> I don't know what is involved in creating a Documentation category.  I
> got the impression from Shaun that it wasn't going to happen upstream,
> but that the Fedora maintainer might be able to do that for us.

I only meant that it's not going to happen in 3.0.0 upstream.
It's just too late for that. That would violate the hard code
freeze, string freeze, and user interface freeze. You might
yet get it into a later version of the shell. Although that
of course doesn't help you right now.

Also, I'd encourage you to think of different ways this could
be presented. Like, instead of burying it in some category in
the (semantically wrong) Applications overview, what about an
overview just for documentation? Instead of shoehorning old
approaches into new interfaces, think of new ways we can fit
help and documentation into the user experience.

> > > 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?
> 
> The old .desktop files still work for XFCE and LXDE.  It is only on
> GNOME where it is a problem.

If there's no combination of categories that creates good
results in all desktops, you could ship multiple desktop
files, each with OnlyShowIn keys set.

--
Shaun