What was this bug about?

Just what the subject says: It's documenting the fact that there's no help text for the budget GUI. 

Candidate files for adding the help text are
src/gnome/gnc-budget-view.c
src/gnome/gnc-budget-view.h
src/gnome/gnc-plugin-budget.c
src/gnome/gnc-plugin-budget.h
src/gnome/gnc-plugin-page-budget.c
src/gnome/gnc-plugin-page-budget.h
src/gnome/gtkbuilder/gnc-plugin-page-budget.glade
src/gnome/ui/gnc-plugin-budget-ui.xml
src/gnome/ui/gnc-plugin-page-budget-ui.xml
src/gnome-utils/gnc-tree-model-budget.c
src/gnome-utils/gnc-tree-model-budget.h

Is there a good place within GnuCash to look at to get an idea how help text should be applied?

I guess my real question is:
Is this a pure Budget GUI bug or a general GnuCash GUI bug?

Take a look at src/register/ledger-core/split-register-model.c or its Register2 twin src/gnome-utils/gnc-tree-view-split-reg.c. Note the strings assigned to the variable "help" and the display mechanism, which will be more explicit in split-register-model.c because all of the display code is present; in Reg2 a lot of it is handled by the GtkTreeView class.

Thanks for hint - that did the trick and now I know what to look at.

While in gnucash-docs we have guide/C/ch_budgets.xml there is none in help/C/. And it is hard to assign, if there is no text with anchors.

IMHO it should be assigned to gnucash-documentation-maint@gnome.bugs - like a bunch of other older documentation bugs.

Who ever will write the help (I don't use budgets), a few hints:

jsled wrote the budgets module and chris some documentation. Seach the mailing list archive for more information.

Perhaps one could use the current guide/c/ch_budgets.xml by adding a few more "id="s to the sections as help/c/ch_budgets.xml

Sorry for mixing this:
<warlord> fell: no, chris shoemaker wrote the budgets.  jsled did SX

I'm a tad confused about what the original bug is looking for - in terms of what benefit will be realised.

The help text as per the column splits is quite useful - i.e. it guides you through what each column is for (when you look down the bottom of the screen). E.g. What is 'num' column for? Oh wait, down the bottom is a useful little message that tells me the kind of thing I can use it for...
For the current budget gui, there is pretty much just time period columns (which are pretty obviously the relevant time period) and rows (which are pretty obviously the account of interest).

Can anyone advise specifically what kind of help messages they would be interested in seeing for any given column/row in the budget gui? Or have I completely misunderstood what this bug is looking for.

I'm happy to take the lead in implementing these little help messages in the code, but don't see much of a use at this point.

There are two ways "online" help is provided: Tooltips, those little messages that sometimes pop up when you hover over a control, and the more complete description of the controls with screenshots and a big-picture explanation that's presented when you select the help menu or in some places click the help button. This bug is about the latter, and it goes in the gnucash-docs repo rather than the gnucash repo.

It's not clear to me from looking at a budget page that tooltips are going to be very helpful in this case.

GnuCash bug tracking has moved to a new Bugzilla host. The new URL for this bug is https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=327636. Please continue processing the bug there and please update any external references or bookmarks.