kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Blair Bonnett <blair.bonnett@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 18 May 2015 at 10:44, Melroy van den Berg <webmaster1989@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>
> I created a patch which opens the online documentation page in the
web-browser, only
>  when the local help file could not be found.
>
> This way the user don't get the pop-up message: 'PDF could not be found'.
> Instead they can read the latest successfully build documentation online
:).

I've only glanced at the patch, but I like the concept.

> Off-topic:
>>
>> It would be nice if online documentation becomes the default.
>> This way the users always read the latest version of the documentation.
>>

I would be opposed to this for two reasons:

* It would be very hard to ensure the version of the online docs matches
the installed version of KiCad. Maybe straightforward enough for release
versions, but with people running nightly builds etc this could get tricky.

* We'd have to check for network connectivity and try to fall back to local
docs if the internet is not available (and yes, I have used KiCad without
an internet connection before).

Any decent prebuilt package should either have the corresponding docs
included, or (e.g., for Linux package managers) have a separate kicad-docs
package that is optional but recommended. I think it is reasonable to
assume that people compiling it themselves are capable of building the docs
themselves, or falling back to the online version.

Maybe we should consider embedding the version of KiCad the docs are
written for into the HTML output (e.g., into any title page and at the top
of the table of contents?) to make it easy for people to check.

Regards,
Blair