I notice that there's an HTMLHELP 1.06 out now. Apologies in advance if this
is old news.
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:45:47 +0200
From: e.a...@jpberlin.de
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] Minor nit: Norton Utilities slow with FDAPM
APMDOS; FDAPM APMOFF fixes.
Hi Shane,
I read your suggestions about hunting that FreeCOM bug where it
stops running programs, sounds good :-) Did you find a clue yet?
Yes. I haven't found the cause of the FreeCOM bug, but I've found something on
the way there.
I was causing FreeCOM to crash on my P3 by running HELP.EXE after a normal boot
of FreeDOS.
I followed Blair Campbell's advice and set my debugger to stop on every DOS
call to INT 21 (instruction CD 21.)
When I ran HELP under MS-DOS, around the 12th DOS call HELP would check the
attributes of a file; then the next DOS call would open the file. The file was
C:\FDOS\BIN\..\help\en\index.html
after that, the program would continue to run normally.
When I ran HELP under FreeDOS, those two instructions would repeat over and
over, trying to check the attributes of and open a different file each time.
The files it tried to open were:
C:\FDOS\NLS \EN \htmlhelp
C:\FDOS\NLS htmlhelp.EN
HELPPATH=C:\FDOS\HELP\EN \htmlhelp
HELPPATH=C:\FDOS\HELP\htmlhelp.EN
TEMP=C:\FDOS\temp\EN \htmlhelp
TEMP=C:\FDOS\temp\htmlhelp.EN
TMP=C:\FDOS\temp\EN \htmlhelp
TMP=C:\FDOS\temp\HTMLHELP.en
and so on. I stopped here, so I don't know what happened when it got to the
end of the environment.
Anyway, that behavior looks very similar to this old bug in CHOICE 4.2
http://www.freedos.org/bugzilla/cgi-bin/show_bug.cgi?id=1666
The program breaks when NLSPATH is set to a nonexistent directory.
I checked and, sure enough, I did have an NLSPATH set to a nonexistent
directory when running FreeDOS. After I got rid of this variable, HELP.EXE
worked.
Furthermore, I could crash HELP under MS-DOS by setting an NLSPATH variable
that points to a nonexistent directory.
After that, I started looking at the source code. CHOICE 4.2 uses KITTEN-B.
CHOICE 4.3 uses a modified KITTEN-B that doesn't have the bug. There's a
KITTEN-C now.
FreeDOS 1.0 comes with CHOICE 4.4, so I assume this is fixed in CHOICE.
HTMLHELP 1.05 uses a KITTEN that is almost identical to KITTEN-B.
I suspect that's the problem.
(At the time I wrote this, I could not find source code to HTMLHELP 1.06 to
check.)
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