Re: spatial stuff detail

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 09:40, John Siracusa wrote:
> On 9/23/03 10:26 AM, Shaun McCance wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 07:58, Michele Campeotto wrote:
> >> On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 14:24, Shaun McCance wrote:
> >>> OS X doesn't have a central help system
> >> 
> >> Sure it does:
> > 
> > Allow me to clarify.  OS X has a central help *viewer*.  It also has a
> > central location into which help file *can* be put for them to be picked
> > up by the system.  But general application help is always bundled in the
> > appdir, not in the central help location.
> 
> ...and yet it appears in the "Help Viewer" application, which was my point.
> The app ("DragThing") pictured is a drag-install and stores its help files
> inside the application package.  Ditto for BBEdit and most other apps in
> that list.

Hrm.  This never worked for me before in Jaguar, but I don't have access
to Jaguar just at the moment to figure out why.  I suspect that the help
viewer searched for appdirs in standard locations, and not across the
entire filesystem.  The Jaguar machine I had did have /Applications on a
separate partition, so maybe that screwed things up.

One of the benefits people always claim for appdirs is that they can be
put anywhere.  But if things like help systems only look for them in a
few standard locations, that rather defeats the purpose.  If I made Yelp
scan the entire filesystem for OMF files, startup time on Yelp would be
prohibitively long, and I'd get a bunch of flames.

--
Shaun