[kde-doc-english] KDE 4 Brainstorming

[Éric Bischoff]

Le Mardi 4 Avril 2006 16:28, Philip Rodrigues a écrit :
> On Tuesday 04 April 2006 3:05 pm, Philip Rodrigues wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I think now would be a good time to start thinking about what directions
> > we want to take for KDE 4 with regards to documentation. This could range
> > from "Keep doing what we do now, but recruit more people" to, well,
> > whatever your imaginations can come up with :-).

Okay, here is some brainstorming, in the hope that it helps.


I would like KDE documentation system to spread to other applications. Let me 
explain.

Documentation on Linux platforms is fragmented (like many other things on the 
system). Fortunatly enough, the KDE help center allows browsing man pages,  
info pages, and sometimes some distribution-specific stuff too.

There are also some projects like scrollkeeper that give some framework for 
integration of the documentation from several projects.

I think that's not enough.

KDE provides a nice API for developping Linux applications. Every day, we see 
new applications being developped on top of this API, without being part of 
the KDE project itself. The purpose would be to offer a similar service(1) to 
Linux applications, be they KDE applications or not.

An application should be able to register its documentation very easily into 
the KDE help center, without knowing the subtilities of KDE packaging system, 
meinproc and so on. It should also be able to ask that a given page is 
displayed, depending on the context, for example some help page about a given 
dialog box.

We would also need to encourage projects to use the desktop's help system. 
That means providing easy way to convert existing documentation, lobbying in 
favour of desktop integration in the various projects (firefox, 
openoffice.org, etc), some of them having reinvented the wheel and developped 
their own documentation subsystem.

Finally, the power of such a desktop-wide help system would be multiplicated 
if it is done in a joint effort with GNOME. Therefore, that's a job for the 
Free Desktop initiative (http://www.freedesktop.org/), at least on the 
normalization level(2).

The benefit for the end user would be 
- a consistent look and feel of the help system between applications
- the opportunity to browse some application's documentation from the KDE help 
center, without launching the application itself

I apologize in advance if such a facility for applications already exists. If 
it does, at least it's not commonly used...

Best,


----
1 This service does not need to be an API, although it could take that form.

2 they already have http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fhelp_2dsystem, 
but it is only about the location of help files.


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