English Gimp help files are not installed by default

Martin, is that a language-pack issue ?

Oh sure, I forgot about the gimp help files. I will add them to the support
packages.

The English help would land on the CD. gimp-help-en is a mere 500 KB, but this
would also drag in gimp-help-common, which is 6 MB. Is this okay for you to put
on the CDs? The tightest install CD so far is ppc (629 MB), the tightest live CD
is i386 (623 MB), so the space would be sufficient.

gimp-help-zh-cn is currently in universe. Okay to promote this to main?

It's quite late to change this; let's work on it for Breezy

Was anything done about this for Breezy?

We have even less space on the CDs now, and non-i386 CDs are overflowed by a
great deal, so I'm not sure whether it's a good idea to add an additional 6.5 MB
to them. If we would drop language-support-en from desktop, that would be
possible, though.

Something to consider post-5.10...

I just installed Dapper Drake and was about to file a bug on this. Its still unresolved - did you decide that help files should not be installed? IMVHO, having the help files is a must; the lack thereof makes a very bad impression to the users.

As of flight 5, that is.

On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 06:00:21PM -0000, pandisv wrote:
> Public bug report changed:
> https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/14597
>
> Comment:
> I just installed Dapper Drake and was about to file a bug on this. Its
> still unresolved - did you decide that help files should not be
> installed? IMVHO, having the help files is a must; the lack thereof
> makes a very bad impression to the users.

We would like to install them, of course, but we are limited by the
available space on the CD, and other content has taken priority.

--
 - mdz

> We have even less space on the CDs now

If you are badly stuck for space you might consider the plugin gimpressionist and the resource files which go with it as they take up several Megabytes.

You might also want to encourage upstream to push more of their data files out to their gimp-data-extras package (like patterns, having 3 different wood patterns by default is a excessive).

The gimp can techincally use PNG or JPEG for patterns and other resources but hasn't converted their old files over yet. If you were willing to do the work to convert the obsolete PAT files to the more space efficient PNG files (and making sure none of the scripts are broken as a result) they would probably be interested in accepting your changes.

Maybe there should be a seperate report to track this kind of bloat.

I added all gimp-help-* packages but the English one to their respective language-support-* packages.

We cannot add the English one to l-support-en right now since that would pull it onto the CD.

My proposal: We drop language-support-en from the ship and live seeds, and instead seed a subset of the current dependencies. Then l-support-en can get the full range of useful dependencies (like gimp-help-en). Matt, Colin, are you fine with this solution?

Setting to needsinfo until decision is made.

The decision is mainly about which type of complaints we want to get: missing translations (if l-support-en does not contain all dependencies that make sense, because of space constraints), or packages which cannot be uninstalled without uninstalling *-desktop (since the subset of dependencies needs to be added to *-desktop then).

it gets late for this, and it's not a very big deal anyway. Remove dapper milestone tag.

I understand the reasons for not including the help files by default, but what about making them easily installable by including them in the "Add/Remove Applications" list? Right now, the user has to use the advanced mode to find it.

How about creating a small script that loads when F1 is pressed that instructs the user how to get and install the files?

I'm no developer, and I'm barely a Linux user, but I wouldn't mind doing the install myself, from Terminal even, if I knew how to do it.

I LOVE the fact that this install is on one CD. Wouldn't ask you to change that for the world, but if the help files are there, seems like there should be some way to get them to the user.

Another use-case for a future https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/CommonInstallHook

I also think it is pretty confusing not to have help files. The user is told by gimp to install them, but it is nuissance and help is essential, IMHO.

We may have enough slack on the desktop CD to install the English gimp help this time around; Martin?

Right, let's see how big the feisty CDs will grow, I'll add it to language-support-en.

Feisty CDs are overflowing already.

I recently installed Gutsy. When I booted to the system after installation and went to system>administration>language support, it immideatelly showed a dialog that there are packages missing for complete language support (english) adn offered me to install these two: openoffice.org-help-en-gb openoffice.org-l10n-en-us - I think gimp-help-en could be added to that - or not?

I performed install when not connected, so I do not know if the packages would not get installed if I were online, but if they did, then gimp-help-en should be installed alongside them, right?

The problem is that we do not add the gimp help to language-support-en, since this package should get to the CDs. If we would drop language-support-en from the CDs and only ship a subset, we could add more useful packages to l-s-en.

On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 10:35:20AM -0000, Martin Pitt wrote:
> The problem is that we do not add the gimp help to language-support-en,
> since this package should get to the CDs. If we would drop language-
> support-en from the CDs and only ship a subset, we could add more useful
> packages to l-s-en.

So are you saying that the reason we don't ship the help for Gimp is that
it's too big to fit on the CDs?

It's unfortunate to ship such a complex application without its
documentation. Perhaps we should change Gimp to link to the online version
of the docs if the local copy is not available?

I just tried it, and it does seem to have the capability to fall back, but
displays a confusing dialog first.

--
 - mdz

language-support-translations-en depends on gimp-help-en now, so this should finally be fixed.