Hi Shane, can you check whether HTMLHELP 1.06 actually fixes the problem? Maybe it only does update the text but not the exe of htmlhelp... It is also important that sources are online.
> Possible KITTEN-B bug: HTMLHELP 1.05 hangs when NLSPATH set wrong. > Sat, 1 Aug 2009 23:35:50 -0700 > I notice that there's an HTMLHELP 1.06 out now. Apologies in advance > if this is old news. > >> I read your suggestions about hunting that FreeCOM bug where it >> stops running programs, sounds good :-) Did you find a clue yet? > > Yes. I haven't found the cause of the FreeCOM bug, but I've found > something on the way there. Hmmm... Did you get closer to the FreeCOM bug yet nevertheless? > I was causing FreeCOM to crash on my P3 by running HELP.EXE after a > normal boot of FreeDOS. > > I followed Blair Campbell's advice and set my debugger to stop on > every DOS call to INT 21 (instruction CD 21.) > > When I ran HELP under MS-DOS, around the 12th DOS call HELP would > check the attributes of a file; then the next DOS call would open the > file. The file was "C:\FDOS\BIN\..\help\en\index.html" after that, > the program would continue to run normally. > > When I ran HELP under FreeDOS, those two instructions would repeat > over and over, trying to check the attributes of and open a different > file each time. The files it tried to open were: > "C:\FDOS\NLS \EN \htmlhelp" > "C:\FDOS\NLS htmlhelp.EN " > "HELPPATH=C:\FDOS\HELP\EN \htmlhelp" > "HELPPATH=C:\FDOS\HELP\htmlhelp.EN " > "TEMP=C:\FDOS\temp\EN \htmlhelp" > "TEMP=C:\FDOS\temp\htmlhelp.EN " > "TMP=C:\FDOS\temp\EN \htmlhelp" > "TMP=C:\FDOS\temp\HTMLHELP.en " and so on. > I stopped here, so I don't know what happened when it got > to the end of the environment. There are three interesting problems here: 1. HELP is not supposed to make the VARIABLENAME= part of any variable part of the file names to open... 2. HELP is not supposed to use any other variables apart from NLSPATH and LANG 3. Your NLSPATH and LANG variable values seem to end with spaces, probably because there are spaces at the end of your SET LANG=EN and SET NLSPATH=... lines in config / autoexec - how did they get in? > Anyway, that behavior looks very similar to this old bug in CHOICE > 4.2 http://www.freedos.org/bugzilla/cgi-bin/show_bug.cgi?id=1666 The > program breaks when NLSPATH is set to a nonexistent directory. That does have a point, although bug 1666 also looks kind of "debated" on that bugzilla page. But yes, it might be that just using a newer KITTEN version will make HELP more well behaved already. Maybe you can get in contact with the devel who compiled HELP exe? > I checked and, sure enough, I did have an NLSPATH set to a > nonexistent directory when running FreeDOS. After I got rid of this > variable, HELP.EXE worked. Furthermore, I could crash HELP under > MS-DOS by setting an NLSPATH variable that points to a nonexistent > directory. Interesting, and indeed similar to bug 1666 again. > After that, I started looking at the source code. CHOICE 4.2 uses > KITTEN-B. CHOICE 4.3 uses a modified KITTEN-B that doesn't have the > bug. There's a KITTEN-C now. FreeDOS 1.0 comes with CHOICE 4.4, so I > assume this is fixed in CHOICE. Feel free to try - thanks! > HTMLHELP 1.05 uses a KITTEN that is almost identical to KITTEN-B. I > suspect that's the problem. In any case, it would be good to update the binary. Which compilers / tools / libraries are necessary to make HELP? > (At the time I wrote this, I could not find source code to > HTMLHELP 1.06 to check.) Maybe it is the same as 1.05 - then the binary is probably the same, too, and only the text got updated. That would mean that also the binary would still have any old bugs. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
