port request: chmcmd

[RJVB (René Bertin)]

FreePascal includes a nice little binary that has standalone interest, and which can be distributed on its own, technically speaking: chmcmd.

This can take the place of MS HTML WorkShop help compiler (hhc.exe) in doxygen applications (HHC_LOCATION); a quick comparison between the chm files built through doxygen by hhc.exe and chmcmd revealed no obvious information or function loss.

The only alternative I am currently aware of to create a single archive file containing what would otherwise be a possibly very large set of HTML files is Qt's compiled help (.qch); in my testing these can be twice as big as .chm files and recent regressions in Qt's Assistant make them a less appealing alternative.

I'm working on an updated port:kchmviewer; having the chmcmd command available without having to install the whole FreePascal environment would definitely be a win, esp. for the API documentation generated by my KF5 ports.

I don't think the command itself is required by FreePascal (to be confirmed, but it's discussed on their wiki as more of a demonstration than an actual tool). I haven't looked at specifics, but a priori it should be possible to build just this executable in the FreePascal source tree. This would lead to a (sub)port that has a build dependency on port:fpc but ships a standalone executable (to be installed in ${prefix}/bin, of course).

I *presume* that the (L)GPL-2 makes it impossible for me to bundle the executable with my port:kf5-kapidocs ?

[RJVB (René Bertin)]

Here's a sample implementation for a port:chmcmd-fpc subport.

I went for a subport in order to reuse some of the existing Portfile code, but also to download the rather large distfiles only once.

[RJVB (René Bertin)]

Superseded by #53096.