pywin32 Generate help file during build rather than as a separate CI step

This generates and includes the help file in the setuptools build, rather than it being a separate CI-only step as before.

This has the advantage that pip installing from source should now always include the help file.

Since helpfiles have been restores, that also means that we should theorically be able to update the online doc from GitHub artifacts instead of downloading/installing from PyPI. (I think that'll require merging the workflow files though).

Nov 19 '24 01:11 Avasam

"but it worked on my machine!"... (and I tried to make sure to test from clean installs !) I think it has something to do with the import pywin32_bootstrap hack. At least the basic idea of pointing a path file to the build folder works, as its not failing on importing isapi

It's also annoyingly basically the same error as in https://github.com/mhammond/pywin32/pull/2392

Nov 19 '24 02:11 Avasam

Hang on, help files are back in non-arm64 wheels since Python 309... I'm betting it's due to a combination of:

https://github.com/mhammond/pywin32/pull/2396
and https://github.com/mhammond/pywin32/pull/2384
(Maybe but likely not https://github.com/mhammond/pywin32/pull/2392)

I'll update the scope of this PR and probably do a separate PR for the now-outdated doc.

Jun 24 '25 03:06 Avasam