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⇱ GNOME Help & Documentation Are In Need Of Help - Phoronix


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GNOME Help & Documentation Are In Need Of Help

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 23 May 2025 at 12:31 PM EDT. 48 Comments
The GNOME Release Team is issuing a call for help as GNOME Help and the associated GNOME documentation are much in need of some assistance.

GNOME Yelp as the help viewer for the GNOME desktop isn't actively maintained. The poorly maintained GNOME Yelp recently seen a significant security issue, still is relying on GTK3 while the rest of the GNOME desktop has moved onto GTK4, hasn't yet landed a conversion to the Meson build system, and simply put is suffering from bit-rot without any really active maintainership.

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The GNOME documentation is also struggling as it's written in the niche Mallard format that relies on its own tooling and is not actively maintained.

Lastly, the GNOME documentation team is "basically dormant" and thus not receiving adequate documentation additions and maintenance.

The GNOME Release Team is thus hoping some in the community would be interested in working on the Yelp help viewer as well as improving GNOME's documentation. Eventually the GNOME documentation should move into a modern documentation format and tooling. Those interested in potentially helping out can learn more via GNOME.org Discourse.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.