OK, here's an ugly truth I discovered. :) kde3 apps need both /usr/share/services/khelpcenter.desktop and /usr/bin/khelpcenter to be able to display their handbook/documentation (Help -> <foo> Handbook) Turns out we had recently omitted khelpcenter from kdebase3 and lost /usr/share/services/khelpcenter.desktop. I just reverted that, for now. In the meantime, many kde3 apps have no direct dependency on khelpcenter. Point is, what should we do: 1. Allow apps to be installed without khelpcenter infrastructure (status quo). 2. Add a khelpcenter dependency somewhere global, say, kdelibs (or equivalent), so khelpcenter is always available. 3. Add a khelpcenter dependency to all kde3 apps. Either way, a tangential issue is to consider splitting khelpcenter out of kdebase(3) (kdebase(3)-runtime?), to allow apps finer-grained access to this (even on F-7/F-8) without pulling in *all* of kdebase. See amarok bug #426803 , for example.
(In reply to comment #0) > Either way, a tangential issue is to consider splitting khelpcenter out of > kdebase(3) (kdebase(3)-runtime?), to allow apps finer-grained access to this > (even on F-7/F-8) without pulling in *all* of kdebase. +1 This would also free some space on the live images (bug 435873).
Discussed on irc with Than, decided to go with plan 1, status quo (for now).
For those who read this and haven't followed all our discussions on this issue: the original problem was that the applications needed both kdebase3 and kdebase-runtime. This was fixed: only a single .desktop file from kdebase3 was needed, that is now provided by kdebase-runtime. So now only kdebase-runtime is required for help. What's not there is explicit Requires: kdebase-runtime on KDE 3 apps using khelpcenter, and I'm not convinced it's a good idea anyway.