[Sugar-devel] Html browse widget for runtime help

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from George Hunt's message of Sun Jan 23 16:12:27 +0100 2011:

> I don't follow the list often, but I feel strongly about this topic.  I
> think that HELP should be included in all new activities. And it's easiest
> for me to develop help, and to borrow from open source docs if they are in
> html format.

I agree that in-activity help is important and HTML is likely to be the
format of choice. That's why I think a simple HTML widget would be
useful.

Starting a full-featured browser is problematic from a security PoV, but
I fail to see why we need that. On the operating systems I've used so
far, there usually was a special-purpose help system, not a browser.


> Towards this end, I hacked an early browse, and included a bare bones
> hulahop client with PyDebug and XoPhoto, currently my only two Activity
> efforts.

I'm keen to try that out, but unfortunately it won't work on my system
(running Debian Squeeze):

=== Begin ===
PyDebug DEBUG command_line: 297||| command_line cmd:/bin/rpm -q sugar
1295809902.461628 DEBUG PyDebug: command_line cmd:/bin/rpm -q sugar
/bin/sh: /bin/rpm: not found
=== End ===

Not sure why you try to run rpm at all, but please at least fall back to
a generic solution that works on all distros, not just Fedora.

> The down side of this approach is that the developer needs to mimic the
> activity menu, for the screen that includes the webview widget.  But it's
> mostly cut and paste. and pretty quick.

We could ship something similar in sugar-toolkit to save activity
authors the trouble.

Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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