Re: Shared Help System

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 22:04 +0100, Phil Bull wrote:
> Hi Shaun,
> 
> On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 09:35 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > Not a lot of response, so I'm going to assume everybody
> > on these two lists just trust us on this.
> 
> I think that's a fair assessment. The only thing I'm concerned about is
> potential clashes between generically-named docs (e.g. if GNOME has a
> desktop-help/ directory but KDE also wants a desktop-help/ directory).
> Will this be left up to packagers to decide what to do?

That's just going to have to be us using less generic names.
Long ago, in a previous proposal for a shared help system,
I proposed using reverse DNS, like org.gnome.desktop-help.
I think we can manage to namespace our documents without
that kind of overhead, though.

So how about we nuke ghelp:user-guide and create help:gnome-help?

> > We use index.page for Mallard and index.html for HTML, so why
> > don't we simplify this whole thing and always use index.docbook
> > for DocBook? We don't need to worry about compatibility with
> > GNOME's existing documents, because those are in a different
> > location and referenced with a different URI scheme.
> 
> That seems reasonable. Will index.xml be supported too?

I've kind of grown to like the .docbook extension. A .xml
file could, in theory, be just about anything. I do still
like using .xml files for anything that gets XIncluded,
for DocBook, Mallard, or XHTML.

And that reminds me, I suppose we should allow XHTML files
with a .xhtml extension.

-- 
Shaun McCance
http://syllogist.net/