[Wine] CHM help not working

[L. Rahyen]

On Thursday October 25 2007 04:04, Jeffrey Cobb wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 16:42 +1300, Ross Levis wrote:
> > I'm a Windows (non C++) software developer and I'm wanting my software to
> > run under Wine as best as possible.  My app uses CHM help files which are
> > displayed in Windows when pressing F1 or clicking Help on the menu, but
> > it does not work under Wine on Linux.  It does absolutely nothing.
> >
> > Is see there are CHM viewers available but Wine does not seem to use
> > them. Any suggestions?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Ross.
> I've run into the same problem... simply put I can't install Visual
> Basic Pro in WINE.  So I had to opt for VMWARE and run VB in a Windows
> XP sandbox.  You can check it out here:  www.vmware.com
>
> You'll wanna take interest in vmplayer for Linux.  It's what I use.  I
> have to wait a bit for the player to come up but it's great for the apps
> I can't use in WINE.
>
> Take Care,
> Jeff

	I think VirtualBox (its free!), especially with Seamless Mode turned on, is 
good alternative to VMWare and much better than VMPlayer. See 
http://www.virtualbox.org/ .
	But hey, this has nothing to do with WINE! And with CHM files too... It is 
much simpler to run CHM-viewer than virtual machine. And of course most of 
real-world users will not use virtual machines at all. So if you are 
developer and want to see your application working on Linux for users (not 
just you) you can use WINE or port it natively (sometimes very hard 
especially if your are using non-standard languages or non-standard language 
features; by saying "standard" here I mean GCC). So in many cases WINE is the 
only choice.
	Let's face it: we really need someone who can and want implement better 
support for help files in WINE. Currently it is far from perfect. Not sure 
should be it proposed for 1.0 release or not. This can delay 1.0 release a 
lot if no one will working on it! Therefore there is no point to make it 1.0 
release requirement: just because there isn't enough people who want to work 
on it! Don't get me wrong! There is some people who did a lot of work for 
better help support in WINE. But a lot of work still should be done to make 
it really good in all (or at least most) cases.
	You may ask: "Why? Many users use help in Windows applications!". Yes, this 
is correct. But:

	1) Most developers either havn't enough time to work on this issue or simply 
think that there is more important tasks (and this is true, good help support 
isn't high priority task).
	2) There is very simple workarounds. Instead of viewing help files directly 
user can run external viewer. In case of CHM kchmviewer should work well. 
This isn't perfect solution of course: even worse, it isn't solution at all, 
it is just an workaround.
	3) Situation isn't very bad. In many programs help works perfectly! For 
example, HTML help in Photoshop CS. However, in many other programs it still 
doesn't work or work very bad (depending on what format and its features the 
application in question uses) and this is exactly the problem.

	What's the conclusion? We need someone who can and want (actively) to work on 
this part of WINE to make it better. And this isn't one-day project, this may 
took weeks or months of work.