Moving help-topics-index.scm

[Derek Atkins]

Jon Lapham <lapham at extracta.com.br> writes:

> > The key point
> > is going to be some way that gnucash can read the file, but it already
> > has to read the help docs anyways.
> 
> Not sure I follow you on this.  But, maybe you mean gnucash will need
> to know where help-topics-index.scm is installed to use it?

Yes, that is what I meant.

> What I was thinking is that the gnucash package could come with a
> simple help-topics-index.scm file which points to a single html doc
> which says something like "you have not installed the GnuCash
> documentation yet." (maybe we could include instructions on how to get
> the docs... but you get the idea anyway).  This would be nicer than
> the current situation, which is to display an ugly error message.
>
> The gnucash-doc package (upon installation) would then install a real
> help-topics-index.scm file over that bogus one.

While a good idea in theory, it does not work in practice.  Two
packages cannot own the same file.  What we COULD do, however, is have
a special help-topics-index-nofile.scm which we can use if we cannot
find the gnucash-docs-distributed help-topics-index.scm.

The real problem is that there is not enough state in the html viewer
to display a real error message when it fails to find a doc.  There is
not enough information to point the user at a file; there is not
enough information to even say "cannot find gnucash-docs".  It would
require rototilling the html apis to fix this, something I was loathe
to do so close to the 1.8 release when this first came up (yes, I
looked into providing a better error message).

> Then we will really have documentation which is independent of the
> application. :)  In fact, you could even install newer docs without
> having to reinstall the main app (which is currently not possible).

Yea, this would be a good thing.

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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