I am not an active developer on Gimp, so I realize my words won't have
much weight here. However, this discussion of the help-system seems silly
to me.
> On Wed, Nov 10, 1999 at 12:26:58PM +0100, Simon Budig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>wrote:
> > in the Gnome-Libs, because some people refuse to install gnome
> > (I dont know why, but there are those people...)
>
> Here is a good reason: gnome is large. TOO LARGE. And if you do not want
> to use the gui it is a big price to pay just for a simple help window.
Just to cast some perspective on all this "anti bloat" ranting:
[glyph@helix ~]$ du -chs `rpm -ql gnome-libs` `rpm -ql gnome-libs-devel`
| tail -1; du -chs /opt/gimp | tail -1
22M total
52M total
(also, GNOME's `lib' directory is 39M all by itself, and note that this is
with perl disabled -- perl stuff won't install into an alternate --prefix
anyway)
In order to be fair, I included all the development stuff from gnome, but
from the user's perspective, Gimp is *much* larger than GNOME, considering
that GNOME has much more stuff in the -devel package. You might argue
that there are more packages to GNOME than that, but on the other hand,
GNOME is much more modular than Gimp.
GNOME *IS* doing something with all that space. X does not constitute a
consistent or friendly UI, and neither does GTK.
Something like a consistent help-system is beyond the scope of the GIMP.
It should not have its own. I understand you want something cleanly
integrated into the UI, but (I know *everybody* doesn't run GNU, or Linux,
but it is becoming a significant plurality) the users who will need the
most interface help are newbies who are running GNOME desktops from
redhat. Or, perhaps they will have KDE -- but how well would Gimp really
integrate w/ kdehelp? Is it really a good idea to ask the user to learn
how to use a different help-system for every application they install?
One per environment seems quite enough.
If you want to write a *better* help browser than the one that comes with
GNOME, start a project to write a help-browser, don't integrate it with
Gimp. Then, have Gimp install some help-files for that browser. I don't
like any of the help-systems that are out there today terribly much (has
anybody ever used any of the MacOS help systems? AppleGuide, Baloon Help,
et. al.? Now *that* is a classy help system, not just a bunch of html
files lying around...) but I don't want an application-specific system,
and I can't think of any user that would.
Just my $0.08 :-)
--glyph