Hi, [This was CC'd to Christian Marillat <marillat@debian.org> but I typed 'debain' instead of 'debian' into the to field.] As far as I understand the Gnome help system is supposed to work like this: - packages ship the documentation only in XML format - as conversion to HTML/whatever is slow, the XML gets converted to the appropriate formats on package installation. - yelp displays the pregenerated HTML, and only generates it 'on the fly' when it is not available/outdated. The problem is that yelp stores the generated HTML in the same directory as the XML data is, i.e. in /usr/doc. This is of course the wrong place for generated data, which should go into /var/cache. Because of that the HTML pregeneration is disabled in Debian, and this causes yelp to be close to unusable (I experienced waiting times of up to 1 minute), since the HTML needs to be generated *every time*. Christian Marillat (the Debian yelp maintainer) has tagged the bug #177167 as 'wontfix' and forwarded it to [0]; as far as I can see, neither him nor the Gnome developers seem to be very keen to fix the bug. [0] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103777 As I am very annoyed by the bug, I am looking into fixing it. But I need some information about the whole gnome help generation process. - what kind of documents are currenty generated from the XML sources? HTML? PDF? PS? Others? Are they/should they all be cached? - what kind of structure should /var/cache/yelp have? - how should the cache be updated? by root running yelp-pregenerate, or by yelp 'on first request'? If yelp must be able to write to the cache, how should it do so? Via setuid or via group permissions (like the man cache). - has any of this already been done? Is somebody working on it? Thanks. -- Aaron Isotton http://www.isotton.com/
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