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Doxygen failed to run html help compiler, hhc.exe error HHC5010 when running from folder that has a parent folder that starts with "."

I am using Conan package manager on Windows to create a package. The conan command to create the package copies files to a folder within %USERPROFILE%\.conan (or C:\Users\xxxxxxx\.conan). Then from this location it builds a Visual Studio project and ultimately calls doxygen.exe to create a .chm help file in a post-build command. The doxygen command fails with:

error : failed to run html help compiler on index.hhp

Further investigation reveals the hhc.exe command executed by doxygen is failing with:

C:\Users\xxxxxxx\.conan\data\Module\1.0.0\user\channel\build\524dc97e4a3dd1f774ea3897f9e4faf26c5457d2\Documentation>"C:/Program Files (x86)/HTML Help Workshop/hhc.exe" html\index.hhp

HHC5010: Error: Cannot open "C:\Users\xxxxxxx\data\Module\1.0.0\user\channel\build\524dc97e4a3dd1f774ea3897f9e4faf26c5457d2\Documentation\html\Module.chm". Compilation stopped.

Close inspection reveals that in the error message, the ".conan" folder is missing. Sure enough, I confirmed that hhc.exe fails when the index.hpp resides in a folder that has a parent folder that starts with a ".".

Attempts to resolve this:

  • changing the Doxyfile setting OUTPUT_DIRECTORY to "$(TMP)/DoxygenModule" resolves the error, but creates the .chm file in another location, which I do not prefer.
  • navigating to the 8DOT3 name of the ".conan" folder, which is "CONAN~1", to run the hhc.exe command, succeeds, but unfortunately I have no way of getting conan to use this 8DOT3 path for creating the package. E.g. C:\Users\xxxxxxx\CONAN~1\...

I can live with the using the %TMP% folder but would prefer generating the .chm in the current folder. Anyone have any ideas?

HTML Help Workshop v1.31 is installed on my machine at C:\Program Files (x86)\HTML Help Workshop, probably from a Visual Studio installation (not sure). I attempted using a version downloaded from Microsoft website (v1.30) as well, which made no difference.

Other info: Conan version 1.18.0, Doxygen version 1.8.14, Windows 10 Version 1809

Solution

  • Unfortunately not a solution, but this is a known limitation in the hhc.exe, see: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/0681145c-223b-498c-b7bf-be83209cbf4e/issue-with-html-workshop-in-a-windows-container?forum=visualstudiogeneral

    HTML Help 1.x command line compiler hhc.exe cannot compile CHM file to folder whose full path contains folder name starting with dot. If you have that problem, you probably specified output path with folder starting with dot, e.g. "d:\My files.NET\documentation". You can use dots in folder names but not at the beginning.

    Edit 2019-11-15: I've just pushed a proposed patch to github (pull request 7402, https://github.com/doxygen/doxygen/pull/7402). This proposed patch changes inside doxygen from the current directory to the short named current directory, but just for the HTML Help compilation.

    Edit 2019-11-16: Code has been integrated in the master version on github.