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.
