Re: Could not convert HTML part to text

[Jack <ostroffjh users sourceforge net>]

On 2016.07.28 12:50, Albrecht Dreß wrote:
> Hi Jack:
>
> Am 28.07.16 01:53 schrieb(en) Jack:
> > I've finally got the git gtk3 branch compiled, but whenever it  
> > downloads new messages, I get a string of errors 'Could not convert  
> > HTML part to text: Failed to execute child process "" (No such file  
> > or directory)'.  That message is from libbalsa/html.c, with the  
> > failing function libbalsa_message_body_get_content.  I have no  
> > problem actually viewing HTML mime parts, and ldd doesn't show any  
> > missing libraries.  I also do not see any error messages on the  
> > console if run from command line.
>
> Unfortunately, webkit does not have a method to convert the html  
> contents of a mime part into plain text (like gtkhtml had).   
> Therefore, configure searches for any of the following html-to-text  
> converters: python-html2text, html2markdown, html2markdown.py2,  
> html2markdown.py3, html2text.  It should emit something like
>
> checking for HTML... yes
> checking for python-html2text... no
> checking for html2markdown... /usr/bin/html2markdown
>
> You can check the result by running
>
> albrecht@deneb:~/Balsa/git/balsa-gtk3$ grep HTML2TEXT config.h
> #define HTML2TEXT "/usr/bin/html2markdown"
>
> in the source folder.
>
> Apparently, you have none of the aforementioned apps installed.  In  
> this case, HTML2TEXT should be undef'ed instead of holding an empty  
> string.  I'll check what goes wrong there.
>
> Thanks for reporting this issue!
You nailed it.  '#define HTML2TEXT ""'

One odd thing is that sometimes it shows '""' in the error and  
sometimes it shows '"&quot' (from memory, not running now - I'm  
not sure whether there is a second trailing semicolon)

Would it be reasonable to have the ./configure show some sort of error  
or warning if it doesn't find anything for HTML2TEXT?

I'll try installing one of those apps and reconfigure.  However, I'm  
pretty sure my Gentoo installed version was using webkit, and didn't  
have that problem.  I'm not sure I want to go to the trouble of  
reinstalling just to see what it did.

Jack