I am not an active developer on Gimp, so I realize my words won't have much weight here. However, this discussion of the help-system seems silly to me. > On Wed, Nov 10, 1999 at 12:26:58PM +0100, Simon Budig <Simon.Budig@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > in the Gnome-Libs, because some people refuse to install gnome > > (I dont know why, but there are those people...) > > Here is a good reason: gnome is large. TOO LARGE. And if you do not want > to use the gui it is a big price to pay just for a simple help window. Just to cast some perspective on all this "anti bloat" ranting: [glyph@helix ~]$ du -chs `rpm -ql gnome-libs` `rpm -ql gnome-libs-devel` | tail -1; du -chs /opt/gimp | tail -1 22M total 52M total (also, GNOME's `lib' directory is 39M all by itself, and note that this is with perl disabled -- perl stuff won't install into an alternate --prefix anyway) In order to be fair, I included all the development stuff from gnome, but from the user's perspective, Gimp is *much* larger than GNOME, considering that GNOME has much more stuff in the -devel package. You might argue that there are more packages to GNOME than that, but on the other hand, GNOME is much more modular than Gimp. GNOME *IS* doing something with all that space. X does not constitute a consistent or friendly UI, and neither does GTK. Something like a consistent help-system is beyond the scope of the GIMP. It should not have its own. I understand you want something cleanly integrated into the UI, but (I know *everybody* doesn't run GNU, or Linux, but it is becoming a significant plurality) the users who will need the most interface help are newbies who are running GNOME desktops from redhat. Or, perhaps they will have KDE -- but how well would Gimp really integrate w/ kdehelp? Is it really a good idea to ask the user to learn how to use a different help-system for every application they install? One per environment seems quite enough. If you want to write a *better* help browser than the one that comes with GNOME, start a project to write a help-browser, don't integrate it with Gimp. Then, have Gimp install some help-files for that browser. I don't like any of the help-systems that are out there today terribly much (has anybody ever used any of the MacOS help systems? AppleGuide, Baloon Help, et. al.? Now *that* is a classy help system, not just a bunch of html files lying around...) but I don't want an application-specific system, and I can't think of any user that would. Just my $0.08 :-) --glyph
