[QGIS-Developer] Using help button from a third-party Processing algorithm

[Matteo Ghetta]

Hi Harrissou,

thanks for raining this important issue again

> * For GDAL, it brings you to the GDAL docs. I think that while
> perfectible, our GDAL alg doc is good enough to link instead, and our
> docs also propose a link to the corresponding GDAL call.

+1. I think that for GDAL the Help button should point to our doc (where
the links to the GDAL official docs are listed ). This allows us to
improve these algs with some more specific examples/pictures/etc

> * SAGA tries to open a page in our docs and returns a 404 (as reported
> in [1]). I guess this would be the case for any other third party alg
> (R, OTB, TauDem, LASTools... to name those we have docs in our repo).

for all these 3rd part providers, we know that it is (and always will
be) difficult to keep the links updated to the official docs. I think
that, if we cannot provide this support, we should drop the Help button
for these providers. I know that it could sound harsh, but better than
opening a 404 page

> IMO, and I already exposed it in the previous message (read it for
> detailed rationales), other than GDAL, pressing a help button should
> rely on the third party algs docs (ie, the way GRASS works). A check in
> the history of our doc repo proves that we do not maintain the other
> algs (reason why I'd like to remove them from our repo) and they
> actually have their proper website, better served than what we document.
> So better use it.
> 
> I don't know if this has to be done in QGIS code or in the plugin that
> links the two tools nor if QGIS proposes the necessary configs to help
> plug the other providers docs (so that we could invite the other
> projects to do the necessary changes/links). But it would be nice to get
> an official position and sort this out (both about keeping unmaintained
> docs and fixing help buttons).

A personal UI opinion: instead of opening an external browser, what
about resurrecting the old Help tab in the alg dialog?

Cheers

Matteo