Make QtHelp optional to save space and possibly have up-to-date online help

[henning-schild]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

comment: The qhc and qch files sum up to around 42MByte and seem to ship an outdated copy of the wiki. Distributions i.e. on Linux might want to split that off into another package or not install it at all.
The online help might be more useful and up-to-date.

Describe the solution you'd like

comment: It would be nice if the application could be built without QtHelp support. So pressing F1 would not do anything at all when manual support is disabled. Or F1 could open online docs in the very same browser, or even just open the URL with the default system browser.
Or the browser could open a fall-back blank page if the qch files are not found. At the moment the Qthelp browser will simply display nothing in case the files are not installed.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Give a reason why someone else should spend time on that request

Additional context

[kiozen]

Thought a bit about that one. One unique feature of QMapShack is that it can be used completely offline if desired. That was the initial motivation to add the wiki as offline version.

I don't think that ~40MB is really much when installing/updating a software these days. Especially for a software that uses several GB of map data to be used offline. And I do not really favor some over engineered solution with offline/online fallback. The actual goal is to get rid of hard to maintain/flaky features.

That said, the relase.py script is a good example how to generate an up-to-date offline documentation. If that is really a problem you can always generate new files.

And, yes, I know you want more frequent releases, but the next release will take some time until I am convinced that the code is in a somehow stable version. And there are still some issues I would like to address.

[henning-schild]

When i use qmapshack i am always online, getting the tiles and do not have a single offline map in it. Never had for many years.
For me the only use-case is to download/upload gpx to/from a Garmin and view the gpx files.

But i assume there is a tile-cache which likely is larger than the 40M. Still i never ever browsed the offline wiki, only briefly after reports in gentoo came up that it was broken. (a problem in the gentoo package which is now solved)

[frankystone]

The tile-cache on my system is currently ~ 150MB. The brouter segments need 1,1GB here.

Never looked into the offline wiki also. But i think having the possibility to look into it is nice for situations where you don't have internet access.