Bug 184748

Summary:	Main-menu should not offer Help for apps that don't have a help document
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 11.0	Reporter:	Eric Ward <eward>
Component:	GNOME	Assignee:	Federico Mena Quintero <federico>
Status:	RESOLVED NORESPONSE	QA Contact:	E-mail List <nld10-bugs-qa>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P2 - High	CC:	captain.magnus, federico, hpj
Version:	Alpha 2
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	SLED 10
Whiteboard:	gnomeup-gnome-main-menu, gnome-usability
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	341831

Description Eric Ward 2006-06-13 23:35:40 UTC

Build - SLED 10 1308

Problem -
While testing the Main menu's default "Favorite Applications" entries, I was reviewing the default actions for each of the entries. After reviewing the default entries I realized that only 2 of the 6 entries had the Help action enabled. 

Since I would consider the Main Menu the Face of Novell that all customers of SLED will see, it only makes sense to have to be as polished as possible. In the case of help, shouldn't this be available via the Main Menu for all default entries? 

Expected Behavior -
Some minimum level of compliance should have to be meet for all default Main Menu entries and their available and enabled actions... Especially the help functionality for these entries. While we can argue that the user could open the application and then bring up the specific applications help from that context, that begs the question of why we have a Main Menu Help action available and enabled that only works in 30% of the default "Favorite Applications" cases.

So in summary, we need to make the extra effort of having a complete and polished main menu that provides an easy and consistent end user experience with regards to the default entries and their associated actions. This means, if it's a default entry, it's going to need to support all actions, especially the "Help" action.

Comment 1 Eric Ward 2006-06-13 23:37:39 UTC

While I'm not going to mark this bug a blocker, I definitely feel it should be fixed for FCS. This doesn't mean JPR can't though :)

Comment 2 Mark Gordon 2007-01-17 15:38:37 UTC

From slab.schemas:

<default>[MozillaFirefox.desktop,evolution.desktop,bansh
ee.desktop,writer.desktop,f-spot.desktop,nautilus-home.desktop]</default>

So the apps in question are:

firefox (from the MozillaFirefox package)
evolution
banshee
oowriter (from the OpenOffice_org package)
f-spot
nautilus

Of these:

- evolution and nautilus offer help in the slab
- banshee and f-spot don't offer help even in the app
- oowriter and firefox have F1 help, but that's not showing up in the slab.  That's presumably a function of those apps using app-specific help browsers rather than using yelp (which in turn is probably a function of both those apps being very cross-platform and not wanting to rely on platform-specific web browsers).

I'm going to keep this bug open with a rephrased summary and open two other bugs against f-spot and banshee requesting some basic docs (#235810 for banshee and #235811 for f-spot).

If it turns out that it's impractical to expose help for apps that don't use yelp, we may want to reconsider exposing help in the main menu and app browser.  Cc: Anna on that question.

If it's impractical to support help from main menu and app browser for apps that don't use yelp, another alternative might be to modify more of the showpiece apps (OOo, firefox) in such a way that their docs are available in yelp... which would require two more bugs.  For now, I'd like an opinion on whether it's possible for the main menu and app browser to show help for apps not using yelp.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the main menu and app browser really only work with yelp.

-> Jimmy

Comment 3 Rodney Dawes 2007-03-15 18:24:10 UTC

I don't think it's a matter of whether it uses yelp or not. It's a matter of whether it provides the appropriate help-related key/value pairs in the .desktop file. As a point of integration, we should ship OOo and Mozilla {Firefox,Thunderbird,whatever else} with the documentation viewable in the help browser (whether it is yelp, khelpcenter, or whatever else that supports the .desktop help hint stuff, and can render the documentation). This means getting the documentation to be viewable in yelp and khelpcenter, as well as modifying the applications to appropriately open yelp or khelpcenter (which is probably doable with desktop-open), when running under the different desktops.

Comment 4 Jared Allen 2007-03-16 21:54:06 UTC

Adding Elizabeth and Aaron.  Elizabeth has help for Banshee.  She is planning on converting to Yelp format and giving to Aaron for inclusion in SP1.  Aaron, please make sure your .desktop file has the appropriate help key/value pair(s) needed for  displaying help from the main menu.  You can look at F-Spot as an example.

We need the same for Evolution and Firefox.  Elizabeth will contact Scott Rhodes regarding and Yelp for Open Office and she is also looking into a possible simple/basic Yelp for Firefox.

Comment 5 JP Rosevear 2007-03-19 14:40:08 UTC

It is a matter of yelp in some cases, because OO and FF have their own help systems and the susehelp scripts only select between yelp and khelpcenter.

Comment 6 Elizabeth Tobiasson 2007-03-28 20:55:39 UTC

For the various apps, could we link to the Firefox, Banshee, OOo, etc. chapters in the SLED 10 SP1 GNOME User Guide? This guide is already in Yelp (well, the updated SP1 version should be in for RC1, but I need to double-check that), and the user would see something similar to the Help they get with Evolution.

Comment 7 Eric Ward 2007-03-29 21:43:58 UTC

JP - Do you know who would be the right person to answer comment #6? jimmyK?

Comment 8 JP Rosevear 2007-04-09 14:48:41 UTC

Yes, comment #6 is a good solution.  Scott Reeves could do the .desktop file work.  We really should get our written help into banshee upstream.

Comment 9 Elizabeth Tobiasson 2007-04-16 22:08:39 UTC

Assigning to Scott Reeves (to the the .desktop work).

Comment 10 Jared Allen 2007-11-19 14:17:22 UTC

-> Mauro

Comment 11 Hans Petter Jansson 2008-02-01 23:27:58 UTC

Still a problem in for Firefox and OOo on openSUSE 11.0, although F-Spot help works now. Was unable to test Banshee due to dependency problems.

Comment 12 Magnus Boman 2008-02-22 23:18:29 UTC

Still an issue with Banshee as well.

Comment 13 Federico Mena Quintero 2008-04-22 22:53:56 UTC

So, to confirm... there are two problems here, correct?

1. Gnome-main-menu shows the "Help" command even for applications that don't have a help document.

2. Our default set of applications as shown on the main menu doesn't have help for everything.

I'll re-title this bug to make it clear that the problem for main-menu is (1):  it should not show the Help command for applications which don't have a help file.

(Lowering severity to Normal)

Comment 14 Mauro Parra Miranda 2008-05-02 19:26:31 UTC

-> LATER (11)

Comment 15 Mauro Parra Miranda 2008-05-02 19:28:24 UTC

Reopening. This is a opensuse 11.0 bug now (used to be SLED)

Comment 17 Larry Finger 2011-04-04 03:37:42 UTC

The version with which you had the bug is now obsolete. I'll close this as NORESPONSE. If you can still reproduce it in current 11.4, please reopen the bug and move it to the appropriate version. Thanks!