Quoting Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org): > The design I currently believe to be sensible is to add an optional > 'Help' field to debconf questions. This field would contain the name of > another question, probably Type: text, whose Description would contain > the help text to be displayed (translated in the usual way). The reason > to do it like this rather than just having 'Help', 'Help-fr', etc. > fields in the question is that this allows multiple questions to share > the same help text, which I expect would be particularly useful in the > partitioner. > > cdebconf frontends could optionally have a facility to access help text > for the current question: for example, the traditional F1 key doesn't > seem to be bound to anything in the newt frontend. (There might even be > room to mention F1 in the help line if we cut down the other text, e.g. > "F1 for help; Tab moves; Space selects; Enter activates buttons" or > similar, though French is probably the test there ... or we could have a > Help button on dialogs with help text. I'm not sure what would work best > here.) If no help text is available, this could do nothing, or perhaps > it could display some generic help text. > > po-debconf would work with this as normal. I like this...a lot. The implementation you propose is indeed very simple and doesn't seem really invasive (except for the impact of translations of large amount of texts). Do you think that such support could also be added to debconf itself? After all, such help system would also be great for regular packages that use debconf (several of them try to explain everything in their debconf templates...which is always tricky when the dimensioning reference is a 80x25 screen). If that isn't possible, that could be an interesting motivation to finally do what's hosed for years: replacing debconf by cdebconf. The prerequisite of having all debconf-using packages properly depend on debconf|debconf-2.0 was achieved for lenny.
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