Not able to read ZIM when launch from Parrallels Desktop Profile Shared Folder

[rgaudin]

When launched from a network drive Parrallels Desktop Profile Shared Folder (aka a shared folder which to Apps appear to be a regular C:\Mac prefixed folder), clicking Open on a ZIM opens a new tab with the correct Icon but that tab is blank.
Very first time I clicked + for a new tab I got an error message which makes me doubt #1236 is completely fixed.

I dont want to open a general ticket but I think the person fixing this should test the overall behavior of the app after fixing it…

[kelson42]

Indeed, exactly the same as #885

[veloman-yunkan]

Could not reproduce with the 2024-12-06 nightly build extracted into a samba shared folder in an Ubuntu 22.04 virtual machine.

[rgaudin]

It's the same with this build on my Windows 11 VM

[veloman-yunkan]

Is it because of the Windows version? Mine is Windows 10 (Pro).

[veloman-yunkan]

BTW, is the confirmation box about running kiwix-desktop from a remote disk/network folder displayed in your case?

[rgaudin]

Never seen that dialog box.

[veloman-yunkan]

Then the problem is that the path of your kiwix-desktop is not recognized as a remote location/network path. What does it look like?

[rgaudin]

Indeed the VM engine I'm using implemented a trick to prevent those apparently common shared-folder issue… creating this one.

See https://kb.parallels.com/130138

I'm not sure there's much we can do.

[veloman-yunkan]

I think that the title and description of this ticket must be updated so that the problem reported doesn't appear much more general than it actually is. Also I believe that at this stage we shouldn't spend any effort fixing issues caused by interoperability between different components of heterogeneous systems (at least when, like in this case, there is a workaround - don't run kiwix-desktop from a shared folder, copy it to your local machine instead).

[kelson42]

I don't fully get the problem, but postponing.

[rgaudin]

Edited. I'll report it to Parallels as well.

[kelson42]

@rgaudin Do we have an upstream Parallels bug link to share here?
@veloman-yunkan Do we have a way to react based on the exception triggered by QtWebBrowser?

If we can not handle the exception properly, I don't really see a way to identify the problem upfront. Therefore I propose to properly document the QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS="--no-sandbox" workaround via env. variable and create a .bat file allowing to do that easily. That would be an acceptable workaround IMHO.

[rgaudin]

Actually, I don't think we should open a ticket upstream as the option is well explained in the doc and a regular shared-folder can be used instead in the options.

I tried and I do get the expected popup about the sandbox.

What we could do is if we can detect the issue, is check whether ran off C:\Mac (which is static home for those special shared folders) and display a dedicated error message.

At this stage, with only myself reporting this, it might not be worth it.

[kelson42]

@rgaudin If I understand properly your last comment, these Parallels Desktop shared folder paths always start with C:\Mac. This is IMHO "unique" enough so we handle it exactly like network drive paths starting with //. Seems to me a good enough fix without requiring serious reenginering... something which might be too much of an effort for such a niche use case! Does that sound reasonable?