Shared documentation system

[Shaun McCance]

On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 04:08, David Faure wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 January 2004 01:01, Claes Holmerson wrote:
> > 
> > On Sat, 3 Jan 2004, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > 
> > > I hope you've all had a nice holiday.  Let's get this discussion fired
> > > back up.
> > 
> > One thing I think would be very useful is if there was a way to find
> > relevant Documentation .desktop files from an Application .desktop file.
> > Would that need some special key in the Application .desktop file that
> > points to them, or can it be derived in a simple way?
> 
> KDE uses DocPath=<relative path to the HTML file> for this.
> 
> IIRC this key is even in the .desktop entry standard (but maybe not its
> exact meaning).

Yeah, we currently do this with X-GNOME-DocPath in GNOME as well, though
it's not very widely used.  I have two problems with this.  First, it's
just a single element, whereas programs may have more than one piece of
documentation.  Second, it bypasses the metadata file.  What's the point
of having metadata if it's not being used?

So in GNOME, if I right-click the gnome-terminal launcher, one of the
menu items is 'Help on Terminal Application'.  All it's done here is

sprintf (item, "Help on %s Application", name);

(That's not the actual code.  But it's an easy one-liner that shows the
gist of it.)  If we pointed to the metadata file, then we could actually
extract the name of the document.  Plus, I think it's just generally a
Good Thing to point the help browser to the metadata file so that it can
do whatever magic it wants to do without having to hunt for the metadata
file for a particular document.

--
Shaun