Profiles in Devhelp

I’m at the GNOME Development Experience Hackfest in Berlin, and one of the things that I wanted to target during these days was to keep on looking at how we can enable different profiles in Devhelp.

As you probably know, Devhelp will show you the documentation of libraries installed in your system (usually only if you have the -devel or -docs package of the library installed). While this is already enough for most users, there is also the case where a developer wants to target a different version (older or newer) of the library than the one installed in the system.

A typical case for this is developing applications using GNOME’s jhbuild infrastructure, targeted either to a given GNOME release or to git master of the involved modules. In this case, if you want to use new methods of let’s say GTK+, you usually end up needing to fire up a web browser and looking for the latest GTK+ documentation either in developer.gnome.org or in your jhbuild’s ${prefix}/share/gtk-doc/html directory.

In order to avoid this, I’m prototyping some ideas to let the users switch between different profiles, e.g.:

• The ‘local’ profile, which is equivalent to what Devhelp currently shows.
• A user-defined ‘jhbuild’ profile, which could point to the install prefix of the jhbuild setup.
• Other user-defined profiles, which could point to other prefixes where the user has installed the newer (or older) libraries and their documentation.
• Profiles for each new GNOME release, e.g. 3.12, which could get downloaded from developer.gnome.org as a tarball containing all documentation for a given release.

The most challenging case is probably the last one, given that it would require some extra work in the website in order to make sure the documentation tarball is generated and published in every new release, plus of course client-side management of these downloaded profiles in Devhelp.

For now this is just a basic set of ideas, the final result may or may not be similar; we’re of course open to suggestions!