Re: [Bug-XBoard] Please Help

[h.g. muller]

At 09:10 10-4-2009 -0700, Arun Persaud wrote:
> I had a quick look yesterday and this seems to be true, one relatively
> big difference for example is internationalization support (well, not
> that big, but it's all over the place). But I think it should be
> doable... Anyway, better to do it now then wait longer ;)

This puzzles me a bit. With 'internationalization' I imagine all menu
text strings being loaded from a selectable file. But AFAIK all menu texts
are hard-coded in the winboard.rc file, it would basically take a complete
re-design of the WinBoard front-end to internationalize it. Or does this
change only apply to XBoard? Then it should be pretty much localized
to the xboard.c file. Tis would make it interact pretty strongly with the
Xaw -> gtk conversion. And since I added quite a lot of menus to XBoard
as well, in 4.3.15, (New Shuffe game, New Variant, Adjudications,
Engine Options, Time Control, all in separate dialog popups, as well
as some simple menu items in the existing pull down), mostly in the
xoptions.c source file, they would all have to be internationalized too.

I hope there has not been any internationalizattion for messages that
go into the debug file.

> I'm happy to work on the merging and gtk part of it. Will probably take
> quite a while, but I should be able to do it unless H.G. puts in new
> features faster than I need to merge the code :) One thing that would
> probably help is if you (HG) take snapshots of your codebase more often
> from now on, so that we can apply small diffs once we have a combined
> version for winboard/xboard.

I will keep a low profile for a while, or limit myself to adding some compact
and contiguous new back-end code, which can be transplanted easily to any
new version. (E.g. for adjudicating the Xiangqi 3-fold repetitions.)

> I also contacted FSF to get the paperwork for H.G. started and emailed
> Allessandro.
>
> Perhaps we should pump the xboard version to 4.5.x for including all
> features from Savannah and HG and then to 5.x for upgrading to gtk (or
> the other way around).

Any reason to skip 4.4? Stepping to 5.1 would suggest a complete re-write
to me. Which would be pretty much the case for the front-end after
the Xaw->gtk change. But perhaps we should also consider overhauling the
back-end code before we dare to call it 5.x. (Just a thought.)


> cheers
>    ARUN
>
>
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