KHelpCenter/coreapps [was Re: Concluding the discussion about splitting kdebase]

[Frans Englich]

On Thursday 11 May 2006 22:27, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
[...]

> * kdebase/coreapps:
[...]
> - khelpcenter

In my opinion, it is a design bug that KHelpCenter, as we know it now, must be 
in coreapps. Here's the solution, which so many times have been floated 
around:

Split KHelpCenter into three parts:

* A library, residing in kdelibs or coreapps.
* A KHelpCenter as we know it now, which uses the above library. It is this 
reference-like, huge manual library which you can lookup everything you got 
on your system, plus the documentation about slaves, and so on.
* A light set of "viewing widgets", possibly part of the above library(and if 
so, it's used by KHelpCenter). When an application needs to view its manual, 
it uses this instead of launching the whole of KHelpCenter.

This achieves three things:

* KHelpCenter doesn't have to be in coreapps
* Viewing manuals from applications is light, fast, and have better usability 
since it's tailored towards the application instead of showing everything 
possible
* Documentation viewing can be done in-process. This is the way to go. The 
Docbook can be customized to allow tags which specifies widget names and so 
on, and by that go in the direction of interactive documentation.

There's a SoC proposal in the direction of this(will follow up with details on 
kde-soc-mentor), which we could use to get man power on this.


Cheers,

		Frans