1. Help Menus

1.1. Description

Help menus with a single Contents item are decidedly unhelpful. We should populate the menu with items that are likely to be relevant to the user. This makes clicking the help less blind, and it gives some indication that there's actually useful content behind the menu. Tech writers would like to be able to associate topics to menus and buttons easily.

To solve these issues, we'd like to have managed menus and buttons, where the application is actually aware of its help and can query it at run-time. This could also be used, for example, to do a quick search on help topics from directy within an application.

1.2. Owner

Shaun McCance

1.3. Involved Parties

Implementation in gtk+, glib, and a provider module. Any app with Mallard help can use it. We don't have to do them all in one go. Nautilus would be a good test app.

For applications switching to ApplicationMenu, this will take work in gnome-shell. Probably will have to wait a release cycle.

1.4. Current Status

Shaun's written prototype APIs for glib and gtk+.

1.5. How to Help

Contact Shaun