Feature changed by: Stephan Kulow (coolo) Feature #306404, revision 38 Title: Provide access to manuals openSUSE-11.2: Rejected by Gary Ekker (michl19) reject date: 2009-12-10 16:21:53 reject reason: 11.2 is past Priority Requester: Important openSUSE-11.3: Evaluation Priority Requester: Mandatory Requested by: Frank Sundermeyer (fsundermeyer) Description: In openSUSE 11.1 it is almost impossible for a regular user to access the official manuals. By default, only the complete set of HTML manuals is installed, while the PDFs are not installed by default. There is no way of easily locating the packages containing them unless you know the package names. In order to improve this * the term "manual" has to appear in the package name or at least in the summary of the package * a Pattern "Manuals" is needed Theoretically the HTML manuals should be accessible via the KDE or GNOME help center. In the past the help centers have made lots of trouble when integrating the manuals, so they almost always were either not available in KDE or GNOME. Since the release of KDE4, for example, they can no longer be integrated into the KDE help center. Apart from that, the help center has certain disadvantages: * no proper search within the manuals * too many clicks are needed to access a manual * not printable * users of other GUIs have no easy access to the manuals (via the filesystem only) Therefore the PDFs have to be installed by default, too. Additionally an entry "Manuals" with links to the PDFs has to be added to the main menus of the GUIs (KDE, GNOME, XFCE,...). Furthermore, the manuals are not accessible directly from the media (the start-up guide being the sole exception), so one can only use them after having installed the system. Therefore providing Installation an Quickstart Guide is kind of absurd. I propose to host the PDFs under /docu in all repositories and create "empty" RPM packages just copying the PDFs from there. Documentation Impact: Evaluate if RPMs can postinstall the unpacked PDFs from the install- Media Discussion: #1: Michael Löffler (michl19) (2009-06-05 16:15:21) Having the manuals accessible in the Help Center is sufficient, adding pdfs imo just nice to have. #2: Frank Sundermeyer (fsundermeyer) (2009-12-01 16:39:11) (reply to #1) As I pointed out in the initial description: Since the release of KDE4 the manuals are no longer available from the KDE help center. #3: Juergen Weigert (jnweiger) (2009-12-01 17:26:58) This request comes from doc-team and doc-team will implement it. The request is only here to synchronize efforts. I see the following defects: - we obsolete old docu packages with opensuse-manuals_en, but do not require the set of new packages. So nothing is currently installed. - user has to guess package names and activly hunt for the packages. do we have a reason for not installing docs? Disc space should not be a limitation. - installation manual should also be unpacked in the root directory of the install medium. RPM package for the installed system also has a copy of this. Look into a more clever RPM package. - create appropriate mene entries. (desktop files?) - place a doc-icon on the plasma desktop (decide if we have PDF or HTML there?) - integrate searchable docs in the startup menue search engine. I see no reasons for not doing any of the above. PM, please advise. #4: Karl Eichwalder (keichwa) (2009-12-02 08:04:28) HTML in KDE4: According to https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=391185 it finally worked on 11.1 (maybe, there is still a confusion with KDE3 and KDE4). A KDE expert must check this please and tell us how the desktop files must look alike and where we should install them. Installing PDF by default: Sometime ago we were told that we should not clutter the user's disk with install two falors of our manuals and that HTML would be the better choice. In earlier times the PDFs used to be unpackaged on the media, though. Aside: I'd rather prefer Info files (and PDFs), but that's a different story. Invisibility of the docs: There is quite some noise about the books in the wiki (and on novell.com/documentation). If you ask google about "opensuse documentation" or "docs", en.opensuse.org/Documentation is the first hit. It looks a little bit different, if you use "manuals" instead of "Documentation", but still fine. Label or Summary of the package description: I just stick with the book title (modulo bugs). Everything else will lead to confusion. These days, package metadata are either kept in BS config files or in our special attributes" files. I would be fine with me, if some human being or an automatic make command would maintain the attributes file. #7: Juergen Weigert (jnweiger) (2009-12-03 19:24:29) (reply to #5) I added SP1 - I know this is a late feature, and I should file such requests. Sorry. Let us please have some improvement to the current situation in SP1. Minimum effort for SP1 is adding appropriate desktop files. Do we have approval here? #6: Karl Eichwalder (keichwa) (2009-12-03 14:13:31) This is a related feature: fate#306322 Accessing PDFs from within the help centers #10: Juergen Weigert (jnweiger) (2009-12-04 15:24:27) Karl, Stefan pointed me to /work/SRC/all/sled-gnome-cbt_en/ *.spec cbt. desktop implements an icon on the GNOME desktop. Is this helpful? Are *. desktop files menat to be KDE or GNOME specific... ? :-( #13: Karl Eichwalder (keichwa) (2009-12-07 10:18:31) (reply to #10) Putting Icons an the desktop is something different. .desktop files are general (see freedesktop.org), but vendor enhancements are possible. Maybe, we should split theis feature. ATM, I do not understand what we want to achieve. On the GNOME desktop (SLED 11 SP1a2), if you click "Computer" > "Help", "SLED Documentation (en)" is listed. If you click on it, the HTML flavor of our docs is shown. You can see something similar on openSUSE. This, at least, is a start. Not sure, what needs to be done on KDE, though. #11: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) (2009-12-05 13:50:14) This looks solved to me -- openSUSE 11.2 installs openSUSE-manual_en- pdf by default, even for a Minimal install chosen in yast. #12: Karl Eichwalder (keichwa) (2009-12-07 09:50:36) (reply to #11) openSUSE-manual_en-pdf is just a meta package. #14: Barry Nichols (barry_nichols) (2009-12-07 12:48:39) I consider myself to be a regular user and I found the manual pdfs easily enough. #17: Karl Eichwalder (keichwa) (2010-01-22 13:55:31) (reply to #16) Yesterday, I submitted new doc packages for SLE11 SP1. Check on beta3, whether the implementation is fine. + #18: Stephan Kulow (coolo) (2010-02-08 11:21:22) + I still fail to see what's left to do for 11.3 -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/306404