Re: [XBoard-devel] GPL and WinHelp

[Eric Mullins]

h.g. muller wrote:
> OK, that is at least something. There still remains a pretty bad
> problem, though. In a sense a magnified version of the problem
> that was already signalled in another thread here.
>
> It will not be able to build WinBoard from source for someone
> that does not have the HTML Help Workshop installed. That was
> also the case with the old WinHelp, but there the Workshop was
> only needed for generating docs. So the makefile could be
> easily changed, or a fake help file supplied, so the make
> process would not abort and a winboard.exe would be produced.
>
> But now the Workshop is needed for the building of winboard.exe
> itself...
>
> How come the old WinBoard did not need a library to define the
> function WinHelp() ? Was there a non-proprietary replacement
> for that?
One of my projects avoids this problem by employing a helper application 
for facilitating html help calls.  In that case, it was to work around 
issues with htmlhelp, but it does have the nice effect of localizing the 
usage of htmlhelp.lib to a small dedicated external application while 
removing the need for htmlhelp.lib from the main app.

Unfortunately, the app/helper is not open source, but I'd be happy to 
help out if this route is appealing.  Then to build the helper, they 
would need the workshop installed.  But generally you wouldn't want to 
do that for such a specialized app that already works.