orca help: the link at the start to "Universal Access Help" does not work [wishlist: more helpful error message]

[Alan Jenkins]

Ubuntu 11.04
yelp-3.0.0-0ubuntu2

Ok, this is only an issue if gnome-user-guide is not installed. It would be nice to have a more helpful pointer that I need to install that package.

It may be that there is already such a pointer, but I'm not getting it because for some reason yelp invokes KPackagekit (despite being run under GNOME)... it's possible I'm also missing the gnome packagekit frontend, but I haven't been able to find one.

1. Run "orca", click the "help" button.
2. See "Before you begin", with a big friendly yellow star, directing you towards the link for "Universal Access Help".
3. Click link for "Universal Access Help".

"Document Not Found
The URI ‘ghelp:gnome-help?a11y#a11y’ does not point to a valid page."

It helpfully provides "Search for packages containing this document.", but

"The files could not be found in any package".

NOTE: the dialog that comes up says "KPackageKit". This is probably because the system was originally installed as Kubuntu. I installed the Ubuntu Gnome desktop (i.e. ubuntu-desktop package) because I'm testing for screen-readers, and I couldn't get a screen reader working in KDE.

[Alan Jenkins (aj504)]

Meant to say - googling didn't turn up much of interest, other than this is a new URL, and it was changed very recently -

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/commits-list/2011-April/msg00223.html

[Alan Jenkins (aj504)]

Ah, probably not an orca-specific bug. As noted, this is probably a bug with my particular setup - I don't understand why KPackageKit is being run instead of the GTK equivalent, and that's probably the actual bug.

If that was fixed, I suspect it would then guide me through installing the gnome documentation packages, which I did not install.

When I've confirmed this, I'll (try to) fix the description and reassign the bug to gnome-help.

[Gabe Gorelick (gabegorelick)]

gnome-orca is the correct package.

[Alan Jenkins (aj504)]

Jeremy, I think you've made a mistake :(. It would help if we had a one-line explanation for why you a) confirmed the bug (including your OS version and desktop environment) and b) reassigned it. For myself, I will try to clarify - it's a bit messy.

What I started to report was that this link didn't work on my system. But that wasn't a bug. The link didn't work because that documentation wasn't installed - because I'd deliberately chosen not to install it. That's cool.

yelp then tried to find out which package I need to install, if I want to read that documentation:

    Search for packages containing this document

I clicked on it, but got

    The files could not be found in any package

The bug is that last line. [I believe that installing the ubuntu/gnome user manuals does "fix" the link - I've certainly seen it working at some point. So in theory it should be possible to reproduce by uninstalling the ubuntu/gnome manual.]

As a disclaimer, it might be relevant that, despite running under GNOME, the installer that appeared to deliver this error message was KPackageKit, not the GNOME PackageKit. I don't know how the URL "ghelp:gnome-help?a11y#a11y" is supposed to be resolved to a specific package.

In fact, I don't know how that error message could be generated at all. I believe APT doesn't know what files are in a package until you install it. My speculation is that PackgeKit assumes a system like YUM (RPM), which has built-in support for searching the files of uninstalled packages.

Ooh... I see there actually is an apt-file command that can do this. I wonder how it works. But it's not present on my current minimal install. So that's another possibility - but if it's really the case that apt-file was necessary, and PackageKit is searching for packages anyway, it seems like it ought to offer to install that first.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Alan, I switched this to gnome-orca because there is a bug in that the Orca help points to the gnome-user-guide which isn't installed on Ubuntu by default in Ubuntu 11.10 and higher (unless it's intentionally installed or someone installed gnome-shell or gnome-panel). The link should point to help:ubuntu-help if Unity is running and help:gnome-help if GNOME is running.

As to the "Search for packages containing this document" not working, I disabled that feature in Ubuntu 11.10 because it wasn't working with Ubuntu's aptdaemon/packagekit implementation at the time. That was bug 838540.

[Alan Jenkins (aj504)]

Thanks! This bug report makes a lot more sense now :).

[Gabor Kelemen (kelemeng)]

Forwarded to upstream as https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689726