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I need some help in understanding how the Yelp Help Browser works. When I start Yelp in Ubuntu 17.10 I get the Ubuntu Desktop Guide, and when I search for terms that should definitely be contained in some of the documentation packages I recently installed, I come up blank.

My understanding (based on this page at gnome.org) is that Yelp uses scrollkeeper's catalogue to generate a table of contents, but it seems that this behaviour is overridden in the Ubuntu distro. Also the Ubuntu version does not have the menus (enabling bookmarking etc.) displayed on the screenshot at that page. When installing the documentation packages I got feedback in the terminal that the package was registered with scrollkeeper. I'll keep searching for an answer, but if you could help out, it would be greatly appreciated.

Inda Vidjool
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1 Answers1

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I had downloaded source code of modern Yelp 3.26 (shipped with 18.04 LTS) and grep-ed it for scrollkeeper occurencies:

apt-get source yelp
cd yelp-3.26.0

Grepping does not get results in code, only in text files

$ grep -ir scroll.*keeper . | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq 
./ChangeLog:
./debian/changelog:
./NEWS:

One of the results from Changelog states:

./ChangeLog: Update slightly to remove scrollkeeper references
./ChangeLog: - Switch to using rarian instead of scrollkeeper

But they do not use even rarian in application code:

$ grep -ir rarian .
./ChangeLog:    Port to Rarian 0.8 series
./ChangeLog:    - Switch to using rarian instead of scrollkeeper
./ChangeLog:    Convert search across to use Rarian
./ChangeLog:    Now Rarian is fast, don't split out man and info pages.
./ChangeLog:    Spoon is now Rarian.  Bump min version to 0.5.0
./NEWS:* Port to Rarian 0.8 series
./NEWS:  - Remove scrollkeeper in favour of Rarian
./debian/changelog:      - Build depend on librarian-dev (>= 0.7.0).
./debian/changelog:    + added build-depends on librarian-dev.

So full-text search is not available in Yelp because of removed ScrollKeeper and Rarian indexers.

Notes:

  1. some patch exists in old GNOME bugzilla #652057 and modern GitLab. But it is not applied on master branch.

  2. if you are using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS you can install build-dependencies, download and apply this patch:

    # software-properties-gtk # enable Source code repositories
sudo apt-get build-dep yelp
sudo apt-get install devscripts

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/yelp/uploads/b51ee8a2dc22f423f06e0293476328e5/xref-handling-and-indexing-for-help-list.patch

mv xref-handling-and-indexing-for-help-list.patch yelp-3.18.1/debian/patches
cd yelp-3.18.1
echo "xref-handling-and-indexing-for-help-list.patch" >> debian/patches/series
debuild -uc -us
sudo dpkg -i ../*yelp*.deb

    After installation you can test patched version of Yelp. Launch it, navigate to All Help, press Ctrl+S and enter for example calculator and press Enter:

    patched Yelp with search

    But it seems that search works only in titles, not in full text.

N0rbert
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