Hi List!
Unfortunately, the online help feature is only *almost* ready, but I
would like to add it to 0.99.5 as it's stable in my eyes - but I was
busy the last days to do the final step. So here's my current problem in
short, I'm looking for opinions.
Background:
- using user-guide.chm on Win32 instead of .html files for the new
"online help" has some advantages and is therefore desired
- when the user looks into the help, having user-guide.chm locally
installed frees user from having an internet connection
- to enable WS to show user-guide.chm requires htmlhelp.h / .lib at
compile time, which is not available as default for MSVC6 (but as a free
download)
- generating user-guide.chm requires some advanced tool/library setup
(JAVA, FOP, ...) - therefore only developers of the guide itself should
be required to generate user-guide.chm
This means for the buildbot:
- create docbook before the Wireshark setup - Gerald already changed this
- it has htmlhelp.c/.lib already installed - no change
- enabling WS setup.exe generation with user-guide.chm requires HHC_DIR
set in config.nmake - can be easily changed
This means for other developers (three options possible):
A.)
- disable HHC_DIR in config.nmake again (and as a consequence don't
provide the online help with "personal generated" WS installations) -
quite easy / but no help and a required change from the default values
in config.nmake
or
B.):
- install HTML HELP WORKSHOP, small download from Microsoft (2-3MB?) -
easy, but some additional work
- download user-guide.chm and copy it into the /docbook dir of the
sources - maybe we could add this to the setup target somehow (where
currently only the win32 libraries are downloaded)
or
C.)
Declare docbook generation (user-guide, developer-guide) mandatory,
which requires a lot of additional tools and libs - this seems overkill
to me for this purpose.
I would like to keep things for newbie developers as simple as possible.
For this reason I prefer B.) as it seems to be the cleanest way without
adding too much additional trouble for a newbie developer ...
So which is the way to go?
Regards, ULFL
