Re: 4+ help systems

Dan Christian wrote:

>I'm trying to get my parents switched to Linux, but I can't come up with 
>any rational explanation of why there are 4 different help systems.
>
>man, info, kde, gnome.
>
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I guess it's because people haven't sat down and agreed
which help system to use. The problem with kde and gnome
is that they are so integrally related to their respective
desktop environments that they won't work with the other
ones, or will at least alienate users of other desktop
environments. The problem with man is that man is really
not the answer for non-geeks.

I don't know what the problem for info is, because I
don't relly know that much about info.

Ultimately, for one standard help system to emerge, it
has to (a) be friendly to a vast audience of geeks and
non-geeks alike, and (b) have features necessary for
importing stuff from the earlier help systems.

Does any such thing exist?

As for the fact that you're trying to convince your parents to
switch to Linux, it's important that you mentioned that too.
--

>
>
>There is no utility that can browse/search all these systems (at least 
>"man -k" style).  If you don't know the name of the thing that you 
>don't know, then you are just stuck.  If it isn't in a menu someplace, 
>then you often have no idea that gnome/kde provides an app to do X.
>
--
Maybe if it's all reduced to HTML then a search engine could be
implemented for this purpose? It would have to be a serach engine
that is similar to those that you see on the web, only that this
one would have to run on the desktop instead of on the web.
--