Replacement for gnome.help_display()

Question

I'm looking at porting a pygtk application to Gtk 3 and gobject-introspection. When help is selected in the menu, the code calls gnome.help_display('appname') to display it.

The gnome package is firmly part of Gnome 2 - in Ubuntu it's part of python-gnome2, with lots of Gnome 2 dependencies. I can't find any equivalent package for Gnome 2. Is there any way to achieve the same functionality without depending on Gnome 2?

Apart from that function call, the app has no particular requirement for Gnome libraries. So a desktop-independent way of displaying the help, which is in Docbook format, would be ideal.

Answer 1

You can use Gtk.show_uri() For instance:

$ python
>>> from gi.repository import Gtk
>>> Gtk.show_uri(None, "help:evince", 0)

The first parameters is the Screen, the second the URI and the third a timestamp.

With respect to the documentation, I would recommend you to use Mallard, which is a way simpler than DocBook and it is oriented to build topic-oriented documentation.