I has been trying today to customize a bit the help dialog of the Partitioner, which is based on CWM:Dialog, which is then based on the ubiquitous Yast::Wizard.
I'm collecting my findings here so other with more knowledge can point where I'm wrong. So take all this with a grain of salt, is meant for corrections. TL;DR The only reasonable option of having a good control on how the help pop-up behaves in a Yast::Wizard is defining from scratch all the wizard buttons like it's done here: https://github.com/yast/yast-services-manager/blob/b00e038670d2381ac38bb726b515865badc73c60/src/lib/services-manager/dialogs/services_manager.rb#L121 Now, the longer version pulling the thread from the Partitioner and CWM::Dialog. By default, CWM::Dialog just calls Yast::Wizard.CreateDialog which offers zero possibilities regarding how to customize the behavior of the help button. The standard help button provided by most kinds of Wizard-based dialogs opens a pop-up whose shape and behavior is defined by the QY2HelpDialog class. That class comes straight from libyui. I didn't find any reasonable mechanism to customize how QY2HelpDialog works (eg. adding the possibility to do something if the user clicks in some hyperlink within the help text). In theory, one could use Yast::Wizard.OpenCustomDialog instead of CreateDialog. But that functionality is currently broken. Is based on the existence of a replace point called "helpSpace" that is not present in the Wizards anymore. Fun enough, the only remaining occurrence of that replace point is in Yast::Wizard.GenericTreeDialog, another old function that doesn't seem to be used anymore (the Wizard module is a code cemetery). That leaves us only with the option discussed on TL;DR, which implements a custom button labeled "Help" that opens a simple regular pop-up to display the help text (eg. no searching box). For that, it uses the commodity method Yast::Wizard.ShowHelp, which does simply that - opening a regular pop-up (not based on QY2HelpDialog) to display some text. That ShowHelp method is not connected to the default mechanism of the standard "Help" buttons. It's only executed if called explicitly and only displays the passed text. It's used seldomly to create custom additional "Help" buttons (eg. in a pop-up that is not really part of the Wizard). I was kind of tempted to test the Services Manager approach in order to add limited hyperlinks support for the Partitioner help... but I'm not convinced it's worth it. Still, the investigation was interesting and I'm writing my findings here for my future self. Cheers. -- Ancor González Sosa YaST Team at SUSE Software Solutions
