Help fails to launch successfully

[Ian]

Binary package hint: sgt-puzzles

In at least three puzzles (Blackbox, Galaxies and Filing), selecting 'Help / Content' or 'Help / Help on [puzzle name]' menu results in a blank window titled 'Help Browser' popping up for a second, then disappearing.

I suspect all sgt-puzzle programs are affected.

'Help / About' works as expected.

Versions: Ubuntu 7.10, package revision r7446.

Was working in Ubuntu 7.04, package revision r6879

[Ian MacGregor (ardchoille42)]

I am using Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and sgt-puzzles 7446-1. Selecting 'Help / Content' or 'Help / Help on [puzzle name]' in the menu results in an error dialog stating "There was an error launching the default action command associated with this location." I notice that /usr/share/doc/sgt-puzzles contains several files including a puzzles.txt.gz file which contains a plain text file with information and directions for each of the games in sgt-puzzles. This directory also contains a symlink to ../../sgt-puzzles/gnome/help/c (which contains html files for each game).

[Ben Hutchings (benh-debian)]

ardchoille, the online help implementation used to depend on the GNOME help browser yelp. You are seeing an error because you don't have that installed.
In 7703-1 I changed the implementation so that it could use one of several different programs. This bug is in the new implementation.

Ian, could you run "strace -f -o galaxies.strace galaxies", try to open help, and then attach the file galaxies.strace?

[Ian (superian)]

Ben Hutchings said:

> Ian, could you run "strace -f -o galaxies.strace galaxies", try to open
> help, and then attach the file galaxies.strace?

On this PC, I'm now on Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 6 (sgt-puzzles version
7703-1)... and the help works, albeit taking you to the contents page
of the help rather than the puzzle's own page. (I can't remember what
it did before it was broken.)

The galaxies.strace file ended up as half a gigabyte in size, perhaps
because I didn't exit both the program and the help instantly. I'll do
it again if you still need it.

I'll be at a PC with 7.10 'soon' to see what happens then.

Thanks,

  Ian

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

Tested on intrepid and can't reproduced it (several tries on each game and one try at least for the others)

[Ori Avtalion (salty-horse)]

Using 7983-1ubuntu2.

Choosing "help" in any of the games launches the gnome help app and gives me the error:
(Example from Galaxies)

---
Could Not Read File
The file ‘/usr/share/sgt-puzzles/help/galaxies.html’ could not be read. This file might be missing, or you might not have permissions to read it.
---

The file is accessible to my user with proper read permissions, so it *should* have no problems.

[Ori Avtalion (salty-horse)]

The problem I reported is a yelp bug.
Yelp fails to open any html files.

I reported it in gnome's bugzilla:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=554016

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10 for anyone else?

[Ori Avtalion (salty-horse)]

Daniel, are you talking about the original bug, or my new description?
Mine still occurs.

[Spook (gcvisel)]

Daniel,

   I upgraded to Ibis last week, and am having this bug, (not able to find the help file.) It makes these fine puzzles just that much more challenging! (You have to figure out what the objective is just from seeing it!)

   Should I reinstall Yelp?

Thanks,
Gerry

[Ian (superian)]

Yes, it was working again, and now it's not. Trying help/contents results in an error :

"The file ‘/usr/share/sgt-puzzles/help/index.html’ could not be read. This file might be missing, or you might not have permissions to read it."

The file does exist:

ian@CORE2:~$ ls -l /usr/share/sgt-puzzles/help/
total 172
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6663 2008-09-22 19:04 blackbox.html
[etc]
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4028 2008-09-22 19:04 guess.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2702 2008-09-22 19:04 index.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3391 2008-09-22 19:04 inertia.html
[etc]

... and we can see that it's globally readable.

Similarly 'help/help on black box' results in a can't read blackbox.html error.

On the other hand, everything now has its own icon :) Personally, I'd prefer them to be a submenu within the games menu, but...

ian@CORE2:~$ uname -a
Linux CORE2 2.6.27-9-generic #1 SMP Thu Nov 20 22:15:32 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[Ian (superian)]

Oh, and yes, it looks like a yelp problem:

ian@CORE2:~$ yelp /usr/share/sgt-puzzles/help/index.html

results in the same 'can't read' error.

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

yes, it seems to be a yelp error. I add it to the bug.

Every game have an icon (it took to me some times to create every time one .desktop file). You can suggest upstream to create such a submenu within the games menu.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

this is a duplicate.