Thanks.
I guess I have been staring at the portable version too long. Thanks for reminding me that each user will have his own APPs dir so modifying/installing the default.conf at install time would be fruitless (in the general case). So, it makes sense to make changes at first run or if no help files are currently configured.
If I modified the help plugin in a generic way that is usable to others (like fetch the default help file(s) configuration from an external file) then perhaps a patch would be accepted (and then I won't be deploying a custom version
)
Let me chew on this a bit.
Thanks for the inspiration.