Arch Linux

Thanks for finding a better way. Opening a zillion repetitive tickets never goes down well :(

As mentioned already, a Package Maintainer Todo List is the best way to handle stuff like this. We'll see what can be done...

yelp is a GNOME thing. @heftig, do you have any thoughts on this? The reporter does have a point. When a similar ticket  FS#74877  came up in the past, it was reasoned that any DE should install a help viewer. And it was also mentioned that Plasma's khelpcenter handled the help files just fine, but this no longer works in my quick testing. yelp only gets installed automatically if installing the "gnome" group.

@Toolybird khelpcenter works for me in the way that apps ask to use it, if available. However it doesn't display the actual help files for the specific app. Another thing is 'gnome-user-docs' that also contains some help files for the settings app and nautilus as example, that we'd need to have if we opt-dep to yelp. In general, there are lots of projects involved here, that might depend on yelp [0], like mate.

One thing that also comes to my mind here is Flatpak, but this seems to be covered by the sdk/runtime[1], so maybe this is not a problem on our side.

[0] # pacman -Fyq /usr/share/help/
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/tree/master/elements/sdk

Yelp is very much a GNOME thing and displays GNOME's help by default. I'm not sure it makes sense to add it to non-GNOME packages just because they install help files.

Is khelpcenter really our only other option, and it's broken?

Sorry, the khelpcenter thing is kinda tangential.

The crux of the issue is that the mentioned apps don't display the GUI help unless yelp is installed. This fits the criteria for an optdep. Of the mentioned apps:

Core GNOME apps-> epiphany, gnome-calculator
Extra GNOME apps-> file-roller
Gnome'ish apps-> drawing, gnome-screenshot, gucharmap, rhythmbox
Cinnamon apps-> nemo, xed, xreader

There's likely a whole bunch of others too...which is why I shut down the mass ticket onslaught. If the consensus is that these apps should have the yelp optdep, I was thinking a PM initiated Todo list could be on the cards (hint, hint :) But if not, it's only a relatively minor issue anyway and we could just not worry about it i.e. "Won't fix".

PS - We could always treat it similar to man pages help. i.e. We don't optdep on "man" for every pkg that provides a man page :)

Ubuntu Mate and Linux Mint do use yelp. So apps of both projects might be good to go with the opt-dep to yelp.

# Note: *Some* of Cinnamon apps (I found nemo) will open the browser to go to the online documentation, on linux mint, while will (try to) open yelp on other distros.
# Note2: nemo will try to open the help for "help:gnome-help/files" that is part of 'gnome-user-docs' and made for nautilus. So I'm not sure if this will help at all to add an opt-dep here. Caja (mate file manager) would depend on 'mate-user-guide' - this one fits in.

@heftig, @fabis_cafe, thanks for your input. It seems clear there is little support for the idea. Therefore as mentioned above, I'm treating this issue as equivalent to the man pages situation i.e. if someone needs to view help files, they simply need to install a help viewer. Someone who cares enough should add a note to the Wiki.