CRITICAL: Help desaster makes app unusable

[secretmango]

When starting up GIMP, I had a warning "Help is not installed in your language!"

I closed it, it appeared again. Luckily the same window was used (Showing "this help appears 345 times"), so I could move it away and change settings.

Workaround

Install the manual package too

flatpak install -y flathub org.gimp.GIMP.Manual && killall -15 gimp-2.10 && flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP &

What should be the solution

First of all this should not happen. It seems GIMP tries to load the help message on startup. It should not be dependend on a locally installed help, which you dont need.

I tried setting "use online Help" with both "internal Browser" and "system browser" (or how its called) and also unchecked the help to be even shown, no effect, some different Error messages.

Please fix this dependency quickly! It makes the app unusable!

[brunvonlope]

@hfiguiere The real issue here is why this package is in GIMP domain 🤔 this isn't a official package.

Because of this, the forked issue was closed in our tracker: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9474#note_2053892. I suggest to doing the same here, unless @Wormnest pretend to do a fix

[brunvonlope]

@Jehan Could you explain if this manual is an official GIMP package?

[Jehan]

@brunvonlope Of course the manual is an official package! We maintain it here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp-help/

@Wormnest is the main maintainer for our manual (which is therefore very well maintained these days!), we also have an online version, and so on. It is as official as it gets.

Now about the main issue:

Showing "this help appears 345 times"

Clearly there is something to fix here (whether or not the manual is installed).

First of all this should not happen. It seems GIMP tries to load the help message on startup. It should not be dependend on a locally installed help, which you dont need.

Indeed it should not. Normally I think that the program is just supposed to fallback to suggesting using the online manual instead. There is something to verify in the code logic and improve.

Also about a root cause of why the manual is not installed, I think to recall that flatpak tries to be clever localization-wise and only install the system language's localization files and this sometimes caused issues. I'm wondering if there is something similar with the manual (though I haven't looked at how it works in our flatpak for some time now).

[brunvonlope]

Of course the manual is an official package!

@Jehan I wasn't talking about that repo maintained by Jacob but about this one: https://github.com/flathub/org.gimp.GIMP.Manual

[Jehan]

Well it's just the sub-package of our main flatpak package, so sure, I consider it official too.

Even though I don't think I have access to it, but it's mostly because I never asked and never needed to do anything on it (so why add more workload to myself!), but I'm pretty sure @hfiguiere and Flathub maintainers would just give us access if needed.

[hfiguiere]

@Jehan already has permission. I can add other people too.

[secretmango]

Just a note I am using the beta 2.99 and never had this issue again. I am not sure if I always used the workaround on 2.1x but I would close this specific issue