[Bug 294182] Re: GNOME's Help Slow to Load

[Anthony Glenn]

Thanks to Shaun McCance for comment #12. I see what the trouble is. Yelp
is setting itself up to display its full glorious range of capabilities
before it starts drawing to the screen. Hence the long delay with
nothing happening on screen. Make it draw its window, menu bar and the
content of the help file as the first thing it does. Defer other
processing until after the window and content are there on screen. Do
the minimum possible amount of processing before starting to draw. Most
users just want to see their help content as soon as possible, then do a
bit of scrolling, go to the next page and that is about it. Make the
common things fast and on the critical path. Defer processing for the
uncommon things.

It is quite possible the user may never use some advanced features, such
as search. It is wasteful to go to the trouble of setting something up,
then throw away all that work when Yelp quits. Do not set advanced
features up at all, until the user first asks to use them. On the
subject of advanced features to defer or cut, I never use bookmarks, man
and info pages or text search. Help Topics is used rarely.

I agree that it is a pain that GTK+ 3 is different from GTK+ 2. Further,
I agree that GTK+ 3 gets used for new development. However, is it not
the case that GTK+ 3 is a superset of GTK+ 2? So it should not be too
difficult to use only GTK+ 2 for common actions, with advanced features
which use GTK+ 3, simply left out. That would give a cut-down version of
Yelp suitable for Lucid and Maverick. Fix this bug, at the cost of some
features regressions. That would be a better option for most users than
sticking with the present buggy version of Yelp. Yes, a few might be
unhappy. Give those people instructions on how to go back to Yelp
2.30.0. I look forward to the next contribution by Shaun McCance.

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GNOME's Help Slow to Load
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[Bug 294182] Re: GNOME's Help Slow to Load

[Anthony Glenn]

Lucid still seems to have Yelp 2.30.0 (with the bug), as of today. If
this bug is fixed in Yelp 2.31.1 then why not push that out as an
update?

I was showing Ubuntu to someone who had never heard of Linux, the other
day. And they wanted to know, What is this Ubuntu thing? So I did
System  About Ubuntu. Well, how to make a bad first impression in one
easy lesson, without even trying. This miserable Yelp thing took around
40 seconds to load, with nothing happening on screen until the last
second or so. It is appalling ergonomics.  I had to apologize, Gee, I
can't understand why this is taking so long -- it is taking even longer
to start than Firefox. Sorry about that.

This long delay in Yelp starting is just not acceptable. Restarts are OK
at around 2 seconds, but that first start is bad bad. Frankly, Yelp
should be a tiny fraction of the size of Firefox and it should be
reading relatively tiny data files. I expect under 1 second starts every
time.

I want (1) Yelp really fixed, (2) this bug raised in importance. Other
people are reporting having to wait over a minute. When you are looking
for help, you are not sure what you are doing. To have the help system
itself malfunctioning, that gives a very bad impression.

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GNOME's Help Slow to Load
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