Fri 08 Sep 2017 10:21:51 PM UTC, original submission:
The reference manual does not open on the Windows platform when Help->Reference Manual is clicked via menu. This works on Linux and on MacOS.
Error Description
The original report is here:
The error message that appears in the output window in the french version is:
Discussion of the problem
I reactivated my Windows 7 virtual machine and also looked into this.
I tested with GNU pspp 0.10.5-pre2g9a68ff.
First the yelp system is tested which fails on windows. The process
for opening the html help on windows is:
a) psppire creates a file „pspp-help-open.vbs“ file in a temporary directory.
The location of the temporary directory is given by the TEMP environment variable. For me this is
TEMP = C:\Users\Fredo\AppData\Local\Temp
In my Windows installation this step works. The content of the file pspp-help-open.vbs is:
My location of the html help files is: C:\Programme\PSPP\share\doc\pspp\pspp.html\index.html.
b) Then the visual basic script is executed via wscript. I can do this via the command terminal in a manual way.
When I run
the Internet Explorer opens and shows the html help file. So this step also works.
The problem is that the wscript is not started via the g_spawn_async call from
psppire. To debug this I added the environment variable: G_SPAWN_WIN32_DEBUG
When I then start psppire via a MinGW shell, then I can see the following:
This means that psppire tries to start "gspawn-win32-helper.exe" in the bin directory
of the pspp installation. But the gspawn-helper there is called gspawn-win32-helper-console.exe.
I renamed the file to gspawn-win32-helper.exe and then the help files open as expected. When started
from the MinGW shell, then I see the following output
I remember that we had some discussion about this helper exe which is required for the
spawning. I have a mingw installation from my experiments
last year and there this „gspawn-win32-helper-console.exe“ is called, i.e. with
this console ending. Using the file you bundled the console opens shortly. Using the
correct gspawn-win32-helper.exe from my mingw installation avoids this.
I think you need to make sure that during your packaging the file
gspawn-win32-helper.exe
is put into the bin directory of pspp.
I also checked the space in the full filename on Windows7 and at least
there is works. I tested the following:
with the space in the path name.
The relevant source code for the help menu (which is not the problem) is here:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/pspp.git/tree/src/ui/gui/help-menu.c
Preliminary testing results
ToDo
Change the windows installation bundle such that the correct gspawn-win32-helper.exe file is
installed in the <pspp>/bin directory.
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