[XBoard-devel] OS X build

[h . g . muller]

It turns out XBoard's GTK front-end can be used with very little
modifications to create a sort of native OS X version (i.e. independent
from OS X' X-server, XQuarz). With the aid of the gtkmacintegration
library a tiny bid of extra code could be added to move the menu bar from
the window to the desktop, moving some menu items to conform to the OS X
customs, and catch the open-file signals that OS X sends when an attempt
is made to start a second instance of an already-running program, to fork
off a new XBoard with the requested arguments. These code additions are
currently activated through #defining a compiler switch OSX.

The question now is how we could best integrate this in the configure /
make process. To build the OSX version requires some extra linker
arguments, and OSX to be defined. The binary App package for XBoard would
contain a number of 'launch scripts', (for XBoard ans some of the commands
it forks off, such as man or info), now not part of the source tree. I
wonder how much of the build process of such a package we could automate,
e.g. by providing it as a make target.