An idea I've been toying with for a while. Has problems, so may end up rejected.

The supplied helpdata.txt containing help on basic Freeciv concepts -- cities, happiness, production, etc -- and the basic help structure bends over backwards to not be specific to the supplied rulesets, and yet it's still not an ideal reference for any ruleset that departs radically from the norm.

I've been wondering for a while if we should make it possible for keen ruleset authors to replace all (or part) of it with their own helpdata.txt customised to their ruleset.

I've no evidence of demand for this feature, it's just something that's occurred to me while rewriting the default helpdata.txt.

The main problem with this idea is that the ruleset is on the server but helpdata.txt is on the client. So the association would require downloading a client-side modpack (perhaps not a problem for the kind of full-service modpack we're talking about -- probably if it has its own help, it has its own tileset as well), and the server would need to at most hint at its location, similar to "preferred_tileset".

I'm nervous of sending helpdata.txt over the network from the server -- quite apart from being big, it would likely end up localised in the server language rather than the client language. Even if we supply the msgids over the network, that would lead to poor user experience in the default case where client and server versions were different and help text changed in a minor way between them -- client would see some paragraphs not localised.