Re: [Bug-XBoard] Please Help

[Arun Persaud]

Hi

> 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.

yes, the change for each string is actually not that big... it just
means replacing "foo" with _("foo") and a macro and the gettext package
takes care of the rest. And it's only for GUI stuff...

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

I wouldn't think so.

>> 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.)

No reason to keep a low profile... keep on hacking :) perhaps just do
snapshots more often, so that we can keep track of the changes better
once we merge... apart from that there is no reason not to keep changing
things as far as I can see... if you want you could try to
rewrite/cleanup the backend perhaps, so that we get a better version as
a base for the merge.

> 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.)

ok... how about aiming for 4.4 to get all the changes from Allessandro
and you in (in case we can get a hold of Allessandro) and then for 5.0
to port everything to gtk and combine winboard and xboard.

Another question: Since I have to admit that I never really looked at
winboard, how much does it differ from xboard? Are most of the files the
same and only a few different and if they differ, do they differ just
because you added/fixed things in winboard or are there big differences
apart from the GUI code?

cheers
        ARUN