On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 11:48:33PM -0400, Jason Spiro wrote:
> >I remember back in 2000 providing a Debian package called 'ayuda' ('help',
> >in
> >Spanish) developed by members of my local IEEE Student Branch. This
> >package
> >included just a simple shell script ('ayuda') and a number of text files.
> >When the script was called it would show up a dialog(1) menu a user could
> >navigate and use to access the manuals included. ...
> >I guess it would be nice to have something similar.
>
> Interesting idea. But, since a) most people have web access nowadays
> and b) people with no web access in a new Linux install can reboot
> into Windows if they need web access, therefore I personally wouldn't
> want to maintain such a package. Of course, you could get such a
> script into Debian yourself (maybe in package debian-goodies or
> elsewhere) if you wanted.
If you do a Debian install and, for some reason, don't get X configured you
don't want to tell people "reboot into Windows and look for help". I, for
example, don't have a Windows partition available. As for the script, I
already provided it in Debian (5 years ago) but it was
a) Spanish-specific
b) not supported by a community
All that I'm saying is that it would be great to start a Debian community
project that was not language-specific and supported and get *that* into
Debian.
> >Since there is no package providing that tool I would say 'general'.
> >However,
> >filing bugs vs. general doesn't mean they will get fixed by themselves. I
> >think that it would be much better if somebody sat down and wrote a "Debian
> >help" system that provided some Debian-specific things and integrated
> >properly with both gnome-help and khelpcenter.
>
> Is more Debian-specific help really needed for KDE/Gnome users? IIRC
> Synaptic comes with Gnome help files. Also, there are already lots of
> HTML-format manuals for Debian.
What I'm saying is that users using GNOME's help system or KDE's help system
cannot find a single bit of advice specific to Debian since *our* help system
(dwww/dhelp/doc-central) does not mesh in with theirs. So if a user (in
GNOME) goes to the task bar and selects 'Desktop->Help' he can, at most,
access the local manpages but there is no 'Debian' section there.
Try running 'yelp', look at the topics and try searching for 'Debian'. You'll
see what I mean. This is not GNOME-specific, BTW, IIRC the same happens with
KDE help center. I'm just saying that a Debian-specific help should be added
to both systems (and should provide the same contents).
Regards
Javier
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