RESULT! (was: Re: Building on Windows from scratch - follow up)

[Geert Janssens]

On Friday 02 May 2014 14:55:42 John Ralls wrote:
> On May 2, 2014, at 1:28 PM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:
> > On Friday 02 May 2014 11:06:14 John Ralls wrote:
> > > The HH installation check is still failing for me, as is the
> > > installation. I ran it by hand and got it to install in c:\gcdev,
> > > but
> > 
> > > the check fails anyway:
> > I suspect it will fail because the html help install step runs
> > pexports and dlltool on the htmlhelp dlls to export the library's
> > symbols.> 
> > > 
##########################################################
##
> > > ###  HTML Help Workshop
> > > 
##########################################################
##
> > > !!! Attention !!!
> > > !!! This is the only installation step that requires your direct
> > > input !!! !!! When asked for an installation path, specify
> > > c:\gcdev\hh !!! ./install-impl.sh: line 1142:
> > > /c/gcdev/downloads/htmlhelp.exe: Bad file number
> > 
> > This is odd. 'What does Bad file number' mean exactly ?
> > 
> > At this point install.sh has determined htmlhelp is not installed
> > properly and tries to install it. In order to do so it attempts to
> > download the hh installer file from the net and then simply run
> > that file. An attempt to run that file results in the error "Bad
> > file number".
> > 
> > Is htmlhelp.exe really available in /c/gcdev/downloads ? Or is this
> > a corrupt download perhaps ?
> It’s there, and it runs fine from cmd.exe. It errors out only in the
> MSys shell.

Hmm, googling around I found suggestions that windows applications fail to run from msys if 
they trigger the Windows Access Control (which should pop up the nag screen if you want to 
authorize the app to do some stuff that's normally protected).

If you run htmlhelp.exe *outside* msys do you run into such a permission request ?

If that's the case it will be difficult to install htmlhelp from within the gnucash instal.sh script in 
msys. An alternative approach could be to install it from within the bootstrap script, which is a 
Windows Visual Basic script. The installation step in install-impl.sh should then only check if the 
library symbols are properly exported and if not do so.

Unfortunately I can't test this because I don't have access to anything more recent than 
Windows XP...

Geert