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newsHelpSurfer crash fixed
I posted about HelpSurfer crashing, and a workaround:
https://bkhome.org/news/202002/helpsurfer-internal-help-viewer-crashes.html
I received an email from James ('jamesbond' in the Puppy Forum).
James investigated a simple HTML viewer based on libgtkhtml, back in
2015:
http://lightofdawn.org/blog/?viewDetailed=00142
Here is an extract of James' email:
Your discovery of HelpSurfer a couple of years ago triggered me to find something similar.
I found gtkhtml-browser and the latest patched version of libgtkhtml.
The source for both of these are now long gone.
I took the code, replaced the http-client backend, and spent hours and hours of fixing and debugging, to try to make it a bit more stable. I believe I have done that, but "for simple pages only!". The main source of the crash is the CSS parser - it is horrible, and should have been re-written, but I have no appetite for that.
Here is my blog report about it: http://lightofdawn.org/blog/?viewDetailed=00142
Here is the updated libgtkhtml: http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/source/800/libgtkhtml- 2.12.tar.bz2
Here is the browser: http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/source/800/gtkhtml- browser-2015-12-20.tar.bz2
You need curl and libxml2 to build it.
Here is how to compile it, to use the system shared libgtkhtml
cd /tmp/gtkhtml-browser*
make OPTFLAGS=-Os USE_SYSTEM_GTKHTML=yes
install -m755 browser /usr/bin/htmlviewer
Or if build it like this:
make OPTFLAGS=-Os
it will build the browser using the static library from the included libgtkhtml in the source.
The included libgtkhtml is the same as the version 2.12 above - so if it is used elsewhere (e.g. Osmo), I suggest you updated it to version 2.12 and build the system shard libs instead.
---
I just re-read the readme that I wrote in 2015 (it's included in the libgtkhtml 2.12 source), and to my amazement, the sources of this final SVN copy of libgtkhtml is still preserved by yocto.
http://downloads.yoctoproject.org/mirror/sources/svn/svn. gnome.org/svn/gtkhtml2/trunk/
http://downloads.yoctoproject.org/mirror/sources/svn/svn.o- hand.com/repos/web/trunk/ patches/
My copy of 2.12 has a few other stability patches in addition to those, though. Mainly on the CSS part :)
OK, I compiled James' libgtkhtml 2.12 in EasyOS 2.2.11. Uploaded the source here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/source/alphabetical/l/
The compiled PETs here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/packages/pet/pet_packages-buster/
Now for the really great news -- the previous problem with crashing has been fixed!
The problem was that the hyperlink in /usr/share/doc/easy/help.htm:
<td valign="top"><b><a href="/usr/share/doc/easy/welcome.htm">welcome</a></b>
...crashed 'surfer', yet, opening welcome.htm directly did not crash:
# surferThe work that James has done on libgtkhtml has fixed it. James, you are a genius! And you have saved HelpSurfer. It lives on.
/usr/share/doc/easy/welcome.htm
Tags: easy