[ CCing pspp-dev@gnu.org ] On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 02:09:27PM -0800, Selma Leathem wrote:
Concerning help for the gui, unless there are any objections I'll use
javahelp, with the idea being that anyone in the future could easily contribute
independent of the platform they are working on. It creates a standalone help
that can be run from the application?similar to the likes of open office, which
is the basis of the layout style I'll use.
I'd not heard of Javahelp before you mentioned it, but anything with those
4 letters in the name it rings alarm bells for me. There are numerous reasons
why this raises concerns:
1. The use of Java based technology has always been uncertain in the GNU project
for licensing reasons. See the text at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html
I don't know if Javahelp itself would have such problems, however I did a
little bit
of (very amateur) research and discovered a thread about it on the debian-legal
mailing
list. See http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/07/msg00044.html - it seems
there is a lot of uncertainty on that discussion.
2. I'm not sure that it would make anything any less platform dependent - at
least not
in any practical sense. I think a lot of people would be very annoyed at
having to
install an entire Java Runtime Environment merely to get help texts.
3. I wouldn't find it easier at all to contribute, since I don't haven't
touched any
Java related technology for about 15 years.
4. It doesn't really fit the GNU standards for documentation. See
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Documentation.html#Documentation
I understand your concern about seemless integration of the help system, and we
need to
improve that. The existing system works reasonably well, but can be made
better.
Part of the reason we haven't done so until now, is that not having anyone to
write
help texts, there simply wasn't much point.
I had envisaged that the help texts would form a section of the user manual,
and
when the user clicks on the Help button, the relevant sub-section of the manual
gets
popped up. This way, the texts can be read as part of the manual (either
printed
or as softcopy), or as online help.
Of course, if you are familiar with Javahelp, and want to use it to write help
texts,
then you are certainly welcome to do so. But I have reservations about
distributing
such texts as part of PSPP. They'd have to be converted to Texinfo or
something else first,
or else you could distribute them yourself as "contrib" work.
Anyway, before we make a firm decision about the format in which the help is
presented,
I think we should get an idea of the scale of the problem (count the number of
help
buttons), and write a few help texts for them - even if they are very rough
drafts.
Then we'll get a better idea of how to solve the technical issues.
Ben, what are your thoughts?
--
PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3
fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285 A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3
See http://keys.gnupg.net or any PGP keyserver for public key.
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
_______________________________________________ pspp-dev mailing list pspp-dev@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-dev
