Index building for initial launch is overly complex

[Onno Benschop]

Binary package hint: khelpcenter

After installing khelpcenter to be able to read the taskjuggler manual and tutorial pages, the initial launch caused several windows to open which prompted for index rebuilding with check-boxes and confusing options.

I'm lodging this as a khelpcenter bug, but it may turn out to be a taskjuggler bug.

Personally, I think that the installation process should just rebuild all indices without requiring the user to either be aware of any such mystic things as what an index might do or provide.

Alternatively, if an index is really only "nice to have", then there should not be a prompt to provide this functionality and this should be a preference.

In my opinion the Human Interface Guidelines many, many years ago (1995) said it best:

A preference should be a setting that the user changes infrequently. If you
provide choices to users that they will change many times in a work session,
you should implement those choices in a menu or other interface element to
which the user has easy, modeless access. By choosing the right way to
implement a feature, you can give users the flexibility to choose, in their own
language, their preferred method of working.

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

Kubuntu-default-settings takes care of this. If you want this changed in the source I recommend forwarding the report to http://bugs.kde.org

Thank you.

[Onno Benschop (onno-itmaze)]

Uhm, I'm not sure that I understand what you're writing.

Kubuntu-default-settings is clearly not an upstream package. The original bug was for khelpcentre, which you changed to kdebase-runtime.

Also, just because this isn't a bug you are personally fixing, doesn't mean that the bug is invalid.

Also, I'm surprised that you're asking me to lodge this bug upstream, seeing that I have no relationship with KDE at all.

[Onno Benschop (onno-itmaze)]

Marking new again.

I also suspect that this bug is not in kdebase-runtime, nor in Kubuntu-default-settings, but I'll leave the package allocation alone for the moment.

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

Let me try again.

Kubuntu is providing "sane" default settings for all of KDE (sane == what the Kubuntu teams considers sane) this also includes preventing khelpcenter from opening the index building at first start (also considering index building is pretty much broken and depends on loads of software we don't ship by default).

That said, either you install kubuntu-default-settings to supress the behaviour or your file a bug report in KDE's bug tracker. I certainly agree that the overal implementation of that dialog is somewhat awkward, but so is most of khelpcenter in it's current status.

Also: khelpcenter is part of the KDE package component kdebase-runtime, so the bug would belong here.

[Onno Benschop (onno-itmaze)]

For future visitors to this bug, Harald and I discussed this on IRC.

His comments included that taskjuggler is kde3, not kde4, so help won't work any more anyway.

A work-around, to be able to read the help is:

 cd /usr/share/doc/kde4/HTML/en/
 sudo ln -s /usr/share/doc/kde/HTML/en/taskjuggler .
 khelpcentre
 -> Then browse to Application Manuals -> Office -> Taskjuggler