[GNC-dev] GNOME Template in Guide but not Help

[John Ralls]

> On Sep 7, 2018, at 4:54 PM, Frank H. Ellenberger <frank.h.ellenberger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi David,
> 
> Am 07.09.2018 um 17:29 schrieb David T. via gnucash-devel:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> In digging around the documentation source XML files (gnucash-help.xml and gnucash-guide.xml) I noticed that gnucash-guide.xml includes:
>> 
>> <!--
>>      (Do not remove this comment block.)
>>  Template Maintained by the GNOME Documentation Project:
>> 	  http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gdp
>>  Template version: 2.0 beta
>>  Template last modified Feb 12, 2002
>> -->
>> 
>> I tried the link, but it is broken, moreover, gnucash-help.xml does not include this information. Is this supposed to be here, and if so, why isn’t it used in gnucash-help.xml?
> 
> As you can see from the date in the template and John mentioned before
> in another thread, almost our whole docs build system was unmaintained
> for over a decade.
> 
> In Gnome 2 this templates were replaced by the GNOME Documentation Build
> Utilities (GDU). See my "research" in
> https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Gnome_Doc_Utils
> 
> ISTM that I opened a bug report too, but can not find it now.
> 
> For some unknown reason, help has the template in each chapter. Probably
> the maintainer at that time was testing the right way and got disrupted.
> I /believe/, having one template per book, not per chapter is the right way.
> 
> The purpose is to collect the infos required to generate the OMF, the
> digital equivalent of the index cards in the library.
> 
> The question, when I got distracted, was:
> should we make GDU a build dependency or must we adapt the useful parts?
> 
> Or in other words: can we keep our translations as they are or requires
> GDU to convert them to gettext-po files. The downside of po files can be
> seen in out frozen italian translation.


Gnome Doc Utils last release was in 2012. It *did* get migrated to an active gitlab project,  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-doc-utils <https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-doc-utils>, but the Gnome docs use https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/yelp-tools/ <https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/yelp-tools/> now. A rather cursory web-search suggests that Yelp doesn’t use OMF anymore, and it’s not really clear to me that our users really benefit much from our using Yelp anyway, any more than they do from our using the Windows Help Browser. I propose in the near term that we just open the docs in the default browser (we already do that for Mac and have since 2.4.0) and try for 4.0 to open them in a GtkWebkitWebView like we do reports.

I think that means we shouldn’t make GDU a doc-system dependency and that there may be fewer “useful parts” than you expect.

Regards,
John Ralls