When GoldenDict Portable was first released, a user noted that sound dirs wouldn't work, and a bit of digging showed the problem to be with GoldenDict's built-in portable mode. I posted a RFE on their forum and received the following reply from one of the GoldenDict devs:
ikmSound dirs are largely dependent on absolute paths, and it would require some work to change that. Since sound dirs are not used by that many people, I've decided it wasn't worth the work. I would accept cleanly made patches to remedy this, though.
I've been meaning to look at the GoldenDict source and try to create a patch, but a lack of time and a suitable development environment (I'm still running off a USB stick, usually without admin rights) has prevented me from being able to do that. Does anyone want to try putting a patch together? Alternately, even a patch allowing me to enable sound dirs, then use PAL to handle the path portabilization, would be great. I'd suggest a command-line switch, something like --enable-sound-dirs, but if something else would be easier to create I wouldn't object.
For anyone who's interested, here are the instructions for building GoldenDict from source. You'll need Qt, version 4.5 or higher, MinGW, and a Git client.
Thanks!
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Yeah, all we need is absolute paths and we're good. Let him know we're happy to assist and have the paf package be official and distributed by them.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I think their concern with exposing the sound dir paths is their own "official" portable version (a zip) - without PAL handling their build, they would probably run into trouble with the absolute paths. That's why I asked for a patch that would let me pass a command-line switch to force exposure of the paths despite portable mode being on.
I'll drop another post in that thread, or perhaps a PM to ikm (any suggestion on which would be better?) and see if we can get something like that worked out.
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."