dhelp exposure
Greetings,
When I started to use Debian, a few really neat features grabbed my attention,
from the packaging tools to documentation centralization. Most pertinent to
this list, I really like the way Debian's menu system makes it into every
window manager and desktop environment around, e.g. it is included in the
GNOME main menu, so newbies like my new grad students can quickly come up to
speed on all of the wonderful applications installed in the system.
Another such Debian innovation is centralized documentation registration, but
relatively little attention is paid to this. I find it remarkable that with
dhelp installed so much HTML documentation is linked from
file:/usr/share/doc/HTML/index.html, and almost no applications make use of
this, so newbies have to know to look in this obscure directory called
/usr/share/doc to find what they're looking for.
Of course even /usr/share/doc is better than what the other distros provide,
but I think we can do much better with relatively little new effort.
So I'm wondering if it might make sense to raise the exposure of this system,
and thus facilitate the use of the extensive documentation available on Debian
systems. Here are some ideas:
* A menu entry in the GNOME help browser, perhaps in the Help menu.
* A pre-installed bookmark in Nautilus.
* Ditto in Netscape (though I've had that wishlist bug report open for
ages).
* A GNOME menu entry: "System documentation" or "Debian documentation"
which opens gnome-moz-remote. Oh wait, this already exists, in the
Debian | Help submenu.
* A gmc desktop icon (okay, this got shot down by the maintainer :-).
Of course, all of this would require that the packages in question depend on
dhelp, but that's got a tiny footprint, and adds extremely little overhead to
the documentation already there.
Just an idea, I'd be glad to work on patches if others agree it's useful.
-Adam P.
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