Recipe and possibilty

Hello,
I just want to create some recipes. I have a few questions about this.
(1) I would like to create a documentation menu in the first stage of Haiku. Is something possible, or contemplated. Is it possible to implement this in the next beta?

(2) Is it possible to create a folder in the Haiku menu structure using the recipe and to link a second app in it. I allude to sorting in the Haiku menu and that it will be infinitely long.
As an example see the picture.
screenshot1

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I think Quassel recipe does part of it and it has its own folder. Maybe have a look at it.

I really would love to see adding a documentation menu part to make it easy find and use end-user documentations (like wonderbrush, koder, beam…, not readmes and man pages)

The Documentation folder is already there. There are man pages, BeBook etc that fit into “Documentation” folder.

mhh, ok. this is a directory in which the documentation is located. Only I see it this way, if new users open Haiku and want to read documentation about the system, programs, etc. you will not find them.
Why not go one step further and insert a documentation in the menu.
I think, it is a small step to make haiku more attractive.

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Yes, you can create as many directories as you want. Packagefs will merge the content of directories from the different packages into one.

The beta is already branched and will be receiving bugfixes only. And, do we really want a Documentation menu here? I’m not sure it’s a great way to browse docs. We definitely need something to make the documentation easier to find however.

It is only of interest for end user docs. The system documentation folder is not really useful for users, because there to many readme and man pages. There is at the end chaos. If one do a good structure to a docs folder in the main menu with a folder for every app who support it or direct link to the doc would be clean, fast to find, user friendly, and something that is not available on other systems.

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I don’t see why the system docs directory should be chaos. Complain to haikuports if their packages put useless or badly organized files there.

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@PulkoMandy

The biggest problem is that you have no direct access to the documentation of the programs if they are in the system folder.
As a new user you open Haiku and you can’t find any documentation.
Now you could say that every program has to bring a link to the documentation. It would be nice if it were. Sometimes you just want to read something briefly without having to start the program.

I am with you in the statement that an intelligent solution for the documentation has to be found.

Yes, I agree, but I think we should have a clean and well-organized folder there, and the DeskBar would just link to it. Not give up on this folder being unusable because there are too many things in it, and make a new one. Otherwise in a few years, we will have Documentation, UsefulDocumentation, ReallyUsefulDocumentation, etc.

As I have now at my work project,

ReallyUsefulDocumentation_final_FINAL_Final version, I swear.odt
ReallyUsefulDocumentation_final_FINAL_Final version, I swear_v1.1.odt :slight_smile:

Good day,

Not sure if this fits here, but regarding documentation, I was thinking on a different approach, like having a “help” application that would load the “help/documentation” of each software. Help files being HTML, just like the BeBook or the Haiku API.

Regarding the documentation folder, it appears on the Deskbar menu as soon as you add some documentation files:
Screenshot%20from%202020-05-26%2016-27-53
Most of these documentation things were downloaded from the clasqm repo, but seems something happened with the repo as these days I’m getting issues on some installations (I have several VM in gnome-boxes, and some pendrives) not accessing that repo to grab the documentation. It has lots of programming tutorials in many languages, ebooks and so on.

Nonetheless, a centralized documentation center would be a nice add-on for Haiku. While it’s on my task list, it’s out of my reach as of today.

Regards,
RR

We thinking about this position but past a update they are lost

bbjimmy has made a nice “help” application.

I would consider a generic “viewer” application, however. On Amiga systems there is Multiview which uses datatypes.library (the same idea as our translators) and can open any file: picture, sounds, plaintext, hypertext (usually in amigaguide format but html could work too), …
I think that’s a nice idea, and it makes things a bit simpler to manage since you don’t have to really worry about the type of a file. Howver, on the other hand, specialized apps are also quite useful in many cases, so maybe it wouldn’t be completely appropriate.

Yep, since recent update of HaikuDepot on x64 only Haiku, HaikuPorts and FatElk are updated.
When you are running SoftwareUpdater, it tells you that it has problems to sync the others but it seems HaikuDepot does not.

The deskbar folder comes with a hpkg from clasqm repo indeed.

I think that we need to differentiate case of docs in “Haiku format” (i.e apps like BePodder, BurnItNow or UberTuber) and case of the others.
For the first, we know that they are html, they are even sharing styles (sometimes with small differences). Some are in documentation folder some are in the app folder. We could group them so they can be navigated with a tool and, later it would help to centralize their translation. I would put folders (named like the app) in an HaikuApps subfolder of documentation.
For the others, it is difficult as you can find virtually everything in them including sample of codes. I think documentation packages packagename is the best we can do. Perhaps some could be converted but who would do that?

How about the BeOS applications “Don’t Worry” and “BeHappy”? Those applications both provided an easy to read and extensible documentation viewer/system. I could at least find the source code for BeHappy (or at least an uploaded version of it): https://github.com/mmadia/behappy-svn_clone

Edit: Actually, here’s the original website with both projects and more: http://www.becoz.org/beos-en

DontWorry/BeHappy is very specific to developer documentation and even, I think, to only the Be Book. It’s not really what we need for a generic help tool, even if it would be great to have it updated :slight_smile: