HtmlHelp status, winecfg and SoC proposal

[Saulius Krasuckas]

* On Sun, 4 Mar 2007, Jacek Caban wrote:
> HtmlHelp maker (hhc, see [1]) doesn't create internal files (parts of 
> chm that describes stuff like index or default topic) and it's GPLed so 
> it's useless for Wine (unless author would relicense it for us). 

Quoting Paul Wise resume from the [1]:

| Started off hacking on frhed (a windows hex editor)
| Made some lame/unfinished patches for POV-Ray
| Wrote some tiny windows software
| Wrote chmdeco/hhm/chmspec
| Been hacking on activismo for a while
| Looking forward to getting ADSL & contributing to xCHM, possibly WINE, GNOME, random projects.
| I'd also like to become a debian developer at some stage. 

Paul seems to be excited about Wine, so hhm relicensing should sound OK 
for him, IMHO.  But only if proved it isn't breaking M$ licences [2], 
right?

> I think it would be a good project for Google Summer of Code. The task 
> would be to write a hhc replacement and add a help option to winecfg. 
> hhc replacement (say whhc) would have to be a plain UNIX tool (it means 
> a bit of code duplication with itss.dll, just like we do in widl) so we 
> could use it during compilation. I think its difficulty is good for SoC. 
> Compressing code may be integrated from some other project. The 
> remaining parts are code of parser of files describing chm and a little 
> winecfg hacking. What do you think?

Nice idea.  Maybe even Paul himself would join that, as he states in his 
blog [3] he needs "Employment, bux, moolah, work".
(I've Bcc-ed Paul in his message)

> [1] http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/hhm
  [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/htmlhelp/html/hwhtmlhelpend-userlicenseagreement.asp
  [3] http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/