Re: [Libreoffice] The future of help [was: Re: Deleting Java from Base]

Hi *,

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 2:52 PM, Jan Holesovsky <kendy@suse.cz> wrote:
> Hi Christian,
>
> On 2010-12-03 at 14:40 +0100, Christian Lohmaier wrote:
>
> > Start with stuff that /any/ user would see.
> > My list would start with:
> > Fulltext search in Help (i.e. <F1>) - that uses lucene and requires java
>
> That one might be actually easy - when the wikihelp is online, I'd
> default to not building the internal help at all, and instead focus on
> converting it from the wiki version to the platform-native (Windows /
> MacOSX / Gnome / KDE [but IIRC, KDE was able to read the Gnome's help
> natively too]) for the releases.  And cut all the help-related code ;-)

Well I just wanted to write "bit VETO!" as at first it sounded like
not shipping help with LO at all, but instead pointing to the online
version..

But well - the problem is that there is not "native version" really.
And I doubt all would have the same capabilities, etc.

> Objections / support / thoughts?

Problem I see with e.g. Gnome native help is that you (apparently)
can't restrict search to the given application.
Also dealing with the "Help" button in dialogs surely would be a
nightmare, as you have to somehow keep track of where the help for
that dialog actually is stored. If help is completely decoupled from
the application code, then you need to maintain (some sort of) IDs,
and the way to launch the "native" help system would differ on
different OS, even on one single OS:

And: What do do with users that don't use GNOME nor KDE? Don't grant
them offline-help at all?

So I'm not all for it. Fine if the own or native help would both be
available, and the user could choose which one to install. You need to
duplicate the help content in the various native formats anyway, so
you could just keep LO's own format.
But then again it still would be nice to search its contents, and then
you need lucene and thus java again :-))

ciao
Christian