[Qgis-developer] Context help is evil and old

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

Hi,

while the idea of context help buttons in dialogs is great...

In practice that help is either not available, or outdated or not
translated or (differently) duplicated into the Documentation
(and as a tranlator it is pretty boring to translate all the context
help texts....).

What about unifying all help in the Manual (website). With Sphinx (our
docs are generated with it) it is pretty easy to point to a specific
paragraph in the manual ( right click on the paragraph sign next to the
heading ). Eg the section about loading shapfiles:

http://www.qgis.org/en/docs/user_manual/working_with_vector/supported_data.html#loading-a-shapefile

We could:

1) either just put a link into the context help so a connected user can
jump to the docs website

2) or we could load that page in the QGIS help dialog (in a webkit widget)

3) or (??) we could try to package the docs into the QGIS install and
load the local file inot the QGIS help dialog.

Only 'problem' I see is that we maybe have to write some more
specialized or more general paragraphs in the manual which are suited
for the context help. I'm thinking about for example the description of
all the functions in the field calculator etc. Or in case of the 'Open
Vector Layer Dialog' about a more general paragraph about the loading of
vector data via OGR.

Another example of very different results for the same topic:

The context help for delimited text context help is VERY verbose and
helpfull:

https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/blob/master/resources/context_help/QgsDelimitedTextSourceSelect

While compared with the docs, these are rather thin:

http://www.qgis.org/en/docs/user_manual/introduction/general_tools.html?highlight=delimited#add-delimited-text-layer

So my proposal: let's get rid of help TEXT in the context help. Put all
text (and energy) in DOCS and link to them or show them.

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde