GSoC : Draft proposal - Improve built-in help

[Shayan Md]

Improve built-in help:

I am a grad student from IISc banglore. I worked on some web
development projects before. I am fairly good at python. I would like
to contribute to mercurial in this summer and also be part of Google
Summer of Code. I am interested in improving built-in help.

Deliverables:

* Cross linking between help topics
* Mange pages in built-in web help
* Example usage in verbose section in help
* Improved glossary
* Better mercurial web view

1. Improve cross linking between help topics:


   There's no linking between the help topic. When we go to /help and
click on a link to a topic we see built-in help of the commands. From
that page if we want to go to other pages we have to go back to /help.
This has to be removed and linking should be given to all the pages.

  This involves changes in templates and linking them to appropriate locations

2. Migrating remaining contents from man pages to built-in help

   http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hgrc.5.html is the html generated
man page of hgrc. Displaying this page in help section.

   Doing the same for hgignore and hg.1

   Implementation: Probably this can be done by writing something
similar to doc/gendoc.py in hgewb/ or help module in mercurial

3. Add example usage to verbose sections in help:

   Topic is self explanatory

   Implementation: AFAI can understand changing commands.help() to
check for verbose flag and display example. But main part would be
documenting the verbose usage. This is more of documentation than
coding.

4. Improve the glossary
   Documentation.


5. Improve HTML rendering in hgweb view:

   I don't understand what kind of improvements you expect. Once that
is clear I can think of implementation


Timeline:

As I don't understand the web view improvements this timeline doesn't
contain web view improvements

Whole program is spanned over around 11 weeks

Community bonding period: upto 23rd May
Read api reference[1], familiarize with code base.

Improve cross linking between help topics - Around 10 days
migrate remaining contents from manpages into built-in help - Around 10 days
Add example usage to verbose sections in help - I need to get familiar
with each every command of mercurial. - Around 10 days
Improve the glossary - Around 10 days
-- Midterm evaluations --
Improve HTML rendering in hgweb view
Code clean up and writing tests
Submitting code to google

Contact details:

Name: Md.O.Shayan
Email: mdoshayan at gmail.com
irc nick: shayan
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