Moving help-topics-index.scm

[Chris Lyttle]

On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 15:43, Derek Atkins wrote:
> > 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).
> 
Yeah, what Derek said. We thought about this but it just wasn't possible
to do in the 1.8 release timeframe.

> > 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).
> 
Well actually you don't need to update the topics file in order to see
the docs, just to skip to the topics/headings. Its entirely possible to
install newer docs with an old topics file. Mind you, when we decided to
go with this I wasn't thinking the topics would change a lot as the docs
were filled in. Oh well, its better than having no one work on them.

The other thing here is, I planned that eventually the docs would be
viewed in the Gnome-2 version of GnuCash through the use of the system
wide 'yelp' help program and drop the independent help browser. How we
hook into this is a subject for future discussion.

Chris
-- 
RedHat Certified Engineer #807302549405490.
Checkpoint Certified Security Expert 2000 & NG
--------------------------------------------
	|^|
	| |   |^|
	| |^| | |  Life out here is raw 
	| | |^| |  But we will never stop
	| |_|_| |  We will never quit 
	| / __> |  cause we are Metallica
	|/ /    |
	\       /
	 |     |
--------------------------------------------