Re: Enhancement of Gnome Help Browser

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Peter Recore wrote:

> I am interested in helping out with the enhancement of the GHB.  I
> noticed on the status page that there no one currently "owns" the
> issue.  My only concern about committing to do it is that of time - I
> would like to do this work in an academic context - ie, to fulfill a
> design project that I must do before I graduate.  While this will not
> affect the actual code written, it would affect the time scale.  I
> believe I could add searching capability by Mid-November, but I am not
> sure if I could embed Gecko as well, which seemed to be the other
> major enhancement needed. Would it be sufficent to get the search
> features in with this release, and then work on the better rendering
> engine for the next release? The thing I like about this project is
> that it is rather self contained and well defined, which makes it
> suitable as an academic project.

I think the first thing that needs doing is requirements/design for the
"ultimate" help system, and then deciding how the existing code base could
be used to achieve that goal. DrMike would be a good person to discuss
this with, since he coauthored the existing one.

> But on that note, if there is some other long term ( next 5-6 months)
> project that is relativley self contained and involves both design and
> coding, I would be interested in that as well.

Having someone manage the whole help system project would be very helpful.
:-) We need work on context-sensitive help and user-annotatable
documentation, for example. You could also cooperate with Tom Gilbert on
his libGuide (nom?) project.

-- Elliot					http://developer.gnome.org/
The first thing a programmer needs to admit is that any program is by far
more complex than his own mind. Thats why he partitions it into neat
pieces and avoids complexity.