[XBoard-devel] HLP file / make / packaging

[Eric Mullins]

Recent posts at the Winboard Forum have exposed an issue building the 
latest version.

I'm not sure how far we should go to accommodate users who want to build 
from source, but it shouldn't be hard to have the project compile with 
just the bare minimum of tools.

For those that do not have the Help Compiler  package, it's probably a 
good idea to allow the project to compile without that tool.  There are 
a couple of ways to deal with that problem:
 1) supply a prebuilt HLP file in the package. As mentioned in the 
thread that exposed this issue, we should make sure that the included 
file is at least as new as the RTF file used to generate it.
 2) remove the dependency completely so that you can build winboard 
without generating the HLP file.  Devs could still build the help file 
by issuing something like 'make -f makefile.gcc winboard.hlp'


Also, as mentioned in the thread, using HLP is fairly dated, not even 
working in Vista (I haven't verified this, but believe it).  Maybe we 
want to explore some other method eventually.