GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 147728
Dia can't find its own help pages
Last modified: 2008-08-10 04:41:13 UTC
1) Run ./configure with the options --prefix=/usr, --sysconfdir=/etc, --localstatedir=/var, and --enable-gnome 2) Run make and make install 3) Click on Help -> Manual in the Dia menu Dia will complain that there is no /usr/share/dia/help directory, even though it's not supposed to look there for its help but rather to /usr/share/gnome/help/dia (where the documentation is actually installed.
This is also a problem in 0.94-pre1
Same here with --enable gnome built via fink on 10.3 unstable branch from the sources version 0.93. Actually the problem resides in lib/dia_dirs.c which does not test for the GNOME variable, and uses DATADIR in all cases, which is wrong. Then, normally with gnome 2.6, the docs are read directly from xml and with yelp, not from html files with netscape, which is not available on all systems. Here the path is /sw/share/gnome/help/dia/C which provides: dia.xml So maybe it requires first a test on gnome version, second a variable for helpdir propagated through the code, not only through the makefile, third an option whether build xml help or html help and the appropriate code/makefile to do it. I may be wrong, of course.
Created attachment 31244 [details] [review] a patch Here is a patch which I just put into the Fedora Core 3 build of dia. Note that it is just a quick bandaid. A proper fix would probably add a get_help_dir() function, and use gnome_help_show() instead of directly spawning yelp...
Marking as confirmed. The use of netscape (or $BROWSER if set) is clearly a hack, however most systems have a browser available. Using yelp for Gnome installs would probably be preferrable.
...or we could use CHM on all platforms http://gnochm.sf.net (not entirely joking, fully searchable help is good for users).
Comment on attachment 31244 [details] [review] a patch Just blindly replacing netscape with yelp is not going to help non-gnome users much. This patch needs some #ifdef GNOME to be acceptable
Marking as NEEDINFO since the patch is not acceptable in its current form.
andrew, michele, j.j.: is this still an issue nowadays, or can this be closed as obsolete?
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 536334 ***