[XBoard-devel] Installer

[h.g. muller]

Are there any suggestions how to handle the WinHelp vs HtmlHelp
issue in the Installer? Should we make this automatic, based on
the presence of C:\WINDOWS\winhlp32.exe (and pick the .chm
file if it is not there)? Problem is that on other systems it might
be in a different folder (e.g. \WINNT), or on a different disk.

Alternatives would be to make it dependent on the Windows version
and give them .chm on Vista and .hlp otherwise. Bbut I don't know
how to do that, and people with Vista might have especially installed
the WinHelp32, and would not get the .hlp file they really wanted.

We could also move the help files out of the core components,
and make them optional, and provide a screen to ask which
version they want. (Cumbersome both for us and the user.)

Finally we could always give them both. WinBoard is programmed
to use WinHelp32 if it is there and the .hlp file is found; in all
other cases it tries the .chm help file.

Although it is not very elegant, I lean to the last option.

One other matter:

I see that every file that goes in the install pakage is now in
the git repository. Is this wise policy? Many of the files are
already obsolete, and we won't maintain most of them ourselves.
(E.g. I received a new Pulsar version by e-mail today, the Polyglot
might still be 1.4w10UCIb22 unless Eric replaced it, etc.)

In addition I can imagine that there could be legal issues:
There are files there of various licences. I was careful to obtain
permission from every copyright holder to distribute them with
WinBoard, often provided their origin would not be misrepresented
and mentioned in the package. But now all files are there just
up for grabs, seemingly unprotected by whatever license agreement.

Perhaps it is better to leave files that come from external sources
simply out of the repository, so that we can obtain them from
the original source when we want to re-build the installer.
I understand now that the files to be included in the installer
need not be in the same tree as they will be unpacked (unlike
when I was distributing by zip file). So a simple method to
upgrade the installer would be to simply use the downloads of,
e.g. Pulsar, Fruit and Elephant Eye as they are distributed,
and unpack them in the installer folder subdirectories. This
would include lots of files we won't include in the installer, but the
script will pick out what we need.