Remove "Online Documentation" from System/Help menu

Thank you for your bug. Could you bring that to a mailing list? Closing the bug report, that's not really a bug and few people read it and comment on launchpad, the mailing list is a better media

Seb - sure, I didn't realise this was a controversial question, it seems really obvious to me.

Which mailing list would you suggest?

The current layout has been decided by Mark, we should probably not change it without getting him approve the change. Maybe try ubuntu-devel. Or maybe Cc Mark on the bug

Thanks Seb. Mark, can you comment on this bug please?

It still seems useful to me to have a link to documentation online, in that menu. System documentation will always be more limited than what's possible online, surely? If only because of space?

For example, if we have videos showing how to do certain things, those are not going to fit on the CD but would fit online. It may well be true that the doc team doesn't have any material online which supersedes that on-disk, but that's a different issue!

Mark: as per the original bug report, the system documentation now includes the facility for searching the online documentation. So there is no limitation.

It's really important for us to get rid of duplicate items in this menu, simply because presenting users with various choices in circumstances where it's not clear which they should choose is a bad idea.

Just ask mpt, he pushed for the implementation of the integrated search function specifically to have this menu entry removed.

That doesn't address the video use case. Is it not true that there is
content which is NOT searchable through Yelp, which we could have online?

Look - if your goal is to remove the link, then you can argue in favour
of that all year long. But the goal is to provide the most complete
possible documentation experience, online and offline, and that's what
I'd like to see before agreeing to removing that link.

Mark

On Fri, 2007-01-12 at 21:03 +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> That doesn't address the video use case.

Well, we are in fact developing some videos, and these will be
integrated into the relevant documentation pages using links. I don't
think a link in the menu (which doesn't really address video anyway)
will assist.

> Is it not true that there is
> content which is NOT searchable through Yelp, which we could have online?

Yes, it's not true ;)

> Look - if your goal is to remove the link, then you can argue in favour
> of that all year long. But the goal is to provide the most complete
> possible documentation experience, online and offline, and that's what
> I'd like to see before agreeing to removing that link.

You've got me wrong - I want to provide the most complete documentation
experience online and offline, and that's the exact reason I'm arguing
in favour of removing the link. I don't have any ulterior motives,
except I am passionate about helping users find documentation easily. We
even wrote a spec about it: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UsableHelpMenu

--
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF

OK, go ahead and remove it for Feisty. I'm surprised that you really
think it's not worth having a direct link to an online entry point but
you're the doc team.

This is now fixed.