Re: Is there someone working on a gnome_help_display replacement?

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 00:23 -0500, William Jon McCann wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-02-12 at 20:36 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> >On Sun, 2005-02-13 at 02:54 +0100, Kristof Vansant wrote:
> >> I started on replacing libgnome and libgnomeui code from project with
> >> gtk counterparts. The most used and not yet replaceable function is the
> >> gnome_help_display function. What I was wondering is: is someone working
> >> on a replacement for gtk or is there another way to replace this
> >> function?
> >
> >I don't think it's likely that such a function would ever make it into
> >GTK+.
> >Even if we finally got a standardized help system on freedesktop.org
> >(and it
> >will happen eventually, I promise), launching the help file is in the
> >same
> >problem space as opening up a web browser or opening a file with the
> >right
> >program.  And I don't think those are things GTK+ is going to address.
> 
> Well, gtk+ 2.6 has addressed a similar problem in the following way:
> http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkAboutDialog.html#gtk-about-dialog-set-url-hook

I don't think it's so much addressed it as it's passed the buck.  All
that
does is allow you to say, "when the user clicks the link, call this
function."
But you still need the function, i.e. gnome_vfs_uri_open.

Really, that's no different than what we do with Help buttons now.  We
hook
up a signal handler that says, "when the user clicks this button or menu
item,
call this function."

It's just a hook.  It's not actually providing the actual activation.

> Also, some good ideas here:
> http://people.imendio.com/andersca/archives/2004/11/index.html

While a good read, this doesn't offer a solution either.  It only says
that
freedesktop.org needs to produce a specification, and then maybe we can
see
about getting that into GTK+.  So until we get the necessary
freedesktop.org
work done, nothing is going to happen.

And really, I'm not entirely convinced GTK+ is the right place for this
sort
of thing.  I don't see any reason why applications can't link against
two
libraries instead of one.

--
Shaun