Requiring yelp everywhere is not an option, it drags the whole xulrunner stack onto the KDE spin.

Why is a broken help menu item considered more acceptable?

Because CD sizes are not infinite. We CANNOT ship yelp. If you add a Requires on yelp, we'll be forced to have a dummy Provides: yelp in a KDE package.

And BTW, if you look at your list, you'll notice that most of those packages which do require yelp are optional -docs subpackages. Obviously you won't get help in the apps without -docs. This split has been done intentionally for size reasons. Even in cases where no special viewer is required, but the documentation itself is huge.

If you add a superfluous provides, that is broken as well. Fact is that, gnome apps that have some documentation depends on yelp. Some apps have docs split up but not all. The desktop comps group has yelp as a mandatory item so this is not exposed much but users who choose to install a non-default set including other desktop environments might get a broken menu item when install other applications. This isn't acceptable IMO but I will let FESCo decide that.

Well, to be honest I don't give a darn about whether you add a Requires: yelp to GNOME applications which are not on the KDE spin anyway, but if you add it to core system-config tools which end up on all spins (e.g. due to Anaconda dependencies), or to Metacity which is dragged in by Anaconda and Firstboot (unless you fix that), we will have to either remove the dependency or add a fake Provides.

So Kevin, what do you propose should happen when the user clicks "help" and yelp is not installed? Launch !PackageKit to install it?

That's an interesting idea, but until/unless that happens, I think an error message is acceptable, at least for those apps where dependencies matter (stuff like system-config-* which also ends up on the KDE spin and other non-GNOME spins).

Let's be frank, most people will never read the documentation anyway. Experts usually don't need it and non-experts are usually too lazy.

Adding to the next meeting, unless there is further info to gather here?

I found that the GTK2 maintainer - Matthias Clasen don't add yelp in his packages.
e.g.
evince

In the 2010-05-25 meeting we agreed to ask folks to not depend on yelp for now.

Longer term we would like to get a stub package or PackageKit integration to tell users how to get help when yelp is not installed.

Leaving this open to track that work.

Last modified 3 years ago. There is no plausible way this is going to be resolved if it hasn't already been.