I have installed the package gnome-devel-docs. It puts a bunch of documentation files under /usr/share/help. The files have the .page extension. The content of these documentation files is not visible in devhelp or yelp. So, all the developer documentation for Gnome is installable but you can’t view it. Anyone have any idea how these files are supposed to be viewed?
I really like the way each Perl module has a man page. I which I could get Java and Gnome documentation like this. Then no matter what kind of system I’m on (GUI or plain terminal), I would be able to view it.
I also wish there was a standard application for viewing documentation. Right now we have man, info, devhelp, yelp, Firefox for html documentation. This is a ridiculous situation. I never know how to find documentation and I certainly can’t search across all of these formats at the same time. Of course, you can Google, but not if your off-line and you may not be able to find the documentation that matches the version of the libraries you have installed.
I see what you’re saying. Based on the file format, they should be viewable in Yelp. But when I open Yelp, all I see is the user documentation (Gnome Help). The developer documentation is not there anywhere. I’ve clicked and searched through it all and it doesn’t contain the developer documentation. I guess the problem is that Yelp is not configured to look for the developer documentation. I think that it should be done automatically. As a user, I shouldn’t have to figure out how to configure Yelp to display documentation that is in the standard repo. I mean that’s just making it harder for for people develop Gnome apps.
Okay, I figured it out. You have to click on the Menu icon at the top. Then select “All Help” from that menu. Then it displays all the stuff I was looking for. That is too hard to figure out. Most people would just give up before they found it. It should display “All Help” by default. That is the normal way people expect help systems to work.
