Of course uninstalling yelp will break user help in every application, so maybe not such a good idea.

We need to figure out what to do about the user help - it's not in good shape.

There's https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/yelp-tools/-/merge_requests/12 which should provide a fallback for when yelp is not installed. RHEL10 seems to use this. https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/yelp-tools/-/blob/c10s/url-handler.patch?ref_type=heads

Just noting, in F42 after removing yelp, nautilus help for example pops up a dialog:

Could not open link

The specified location is not supported

[ Close ]

Yelp can be uninstalled now anyway

Yep, I'm not prevented from uninstalling it. And it's not listed in any files in /etc/dnf/protected.d

It can be uninstalled with dnf, but not in GNOME Software because its appstream metainfo contains <compulsory_for_desktop>GNOME</compulsory_for_desktop>:

The Working Group is OK with allowing Yelp to be removed, but only under one of the following two conditions, to ensure that user help links in applications do not break:

• Enable yelp-tools url-handler.patch in Fedora (currently it is only enabled in RHEL), and ensure the yelp-tools handler does not conflict with the main Yelp app by taking precedence over it, since it was not designed to be used on a system that has Yelp installed. (Michael's note: we should probably insist on upstreaming this first.)
• GNOME apps are modified to not show the user help menu items if Yelp is not installed. (Michael's note: this might be tricky to do. Probably would require a new portal.)

The second possibility seems rather tricky and certainly much harder than the first possibility. I'll leave this issue report open for now in case a volunteer emerges to work on this, but I'll likely close this issue sooner or later if nobody volunteers to do the work. We used to have at least a dozen non-removable apps. Probably more. I think having only three is not so bad.

Allan notes that the main underlying problem here is that GNOME's user help is not actually very good, which is going to require some effort to address.

If anybody wants to work on this, please reference the comment above.

I don't think the Working Group needs to continue tracking this. Sorry!

This issue has been migrated to Fedora Forge:
https://forge.fedoraproject.org/workstation/tickets/issues/451

Please continue any further discussion there.