Community
Participate
Working Groups
Currently if you want to use the help for some plug-in you have to have that plug-in installed in your Eclipse IDE. Since our current development setup is different from the one of an Eclipse developer that is not always the best option. In our current setup we have plain Eclipse as our development IDE. In the product we are developing one of the pre-requisites is GEF. If I want to see GEF docs and help I have to install those plug-ins in my IDE even though I do not use GEF in my IDE. It is only used in the product we're developing. There should be a better way to include help/docs without having to install the given plug-ins in your IDE. There could be an option to point to help files or plug-ins while running Eclipse and dinamically populate the help system.
To view help of a plug-in that is in your workspace you do not have to install this plug-in in your IDE, you can launch it using PDE. I do not believe that help system contained in Eclipse Platform should be able to launch help for code in the workspace, whether it is packaged as Eclipse help or other help. I think there should be a way to view help in Eclipse format for a plug-in in the workspace only if PDE has been installed. And currently it is already possible. You can use PDE to launch runtime workbench using most plug-ins from development workbench plus the plug-in from workspace that contains help for component you are using. This lets you view help for a component without destabilizing your IDE configuration. I agree that there an easier way not involving more than couple of mouse clicks, would be helpful, but doubt that it should be made part of Eclipse Platform or Rich Client Platform (in 3.0). It is definitely an IDE task. Another way for an easier access to GEF documentation is to have the documentation installed on an infocenter, and be accessible using a browser. Eclipse help system supports this scenario, but some effort and resources to set up an infocenter is required on part of library provider.
Marking as P4 - unlikely to be looked at for 3.1.
Having remote help where you can browse help installed on a remote infocenter would allow you to browse help for plugins not installed as part of the base workbench. Marking as duplicate. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 122967 ***
