D8211: KDevelop/Documentation : support using QTextBrowser (WIP/PoC)

[René J.V. Bertin]

Sending these thoughts to the list so as not to burden the phab ticket.

I still think that a more thorough overhaul of the whole documentation feature would be welcome. Having a really good documentation browser that supports multiple formats would be very useful. Qt's Assistant gets close but of course supports only QtHelp (and has severe limitations at least on Mac where it quickly runs out of open file descriptors; somehow KDevelop's approach is immune to that - I think I have an idea why but that would take us too far off-topic). There's Zeal but it only supports .docset bundles (it too dropped WebEngine support, btw).

What I'd like to see is a standalone application that can integrate tightly with KDevelop, e.g. using KParts or by providing KDevelop plugins. It would provide contextual help "balloons" which where possible/relevant contain a thingy to click that would open the documentation in question in the full-fledged browser. This could take the form of an extension to Konqueror (with the caveat that it currently doesn't render any HTML on Mac).

Thinking aloud and taking this a step further: would it be possible to write a Chrome extension that adds qthelp: support to Chrome-based browsers (plus whatever other scheme we'd need)? A standalone documentation browser is a great idea, but if that has to be based on WebKit or WebEngine it would to a large extent duplicate a kind of application we all have already (and probably have running all the time).

R.