Re: [Bug-XBoard] [bug #39971] fix configure switches misbehaving

[h . g . muller]

> The doc files suggest that the ZIICS chess sets were in a
> format unique to ZIICS, but that the ones called "Fritz" were converted
> from Fritz -- whether with or without permission I don't know.

Well, the situation with pieces for XBoard since the switch to Cairo is
such that anything people made and used before is no longer usable without
converting it first to PNG. This can be done comparatively easily, but
even then the situation is less than ideal, because the PNG cannot be
scaled, and the new XBoard no longer automatically selects pieces matching
the current board size, as the old one did for the pixmaps. It really
relies on SVG. But AFAIK there is no automatic conversion from pixmaps to
SVG.

People could pick a size most convenient for them, and install those as
PNG in their pieceImageDirectory. They would still have scaled version
available at othe board sizes, but they would look more fuzzy, as PNG
doesn't scale very well.

There were a lot of nice (colored) piece graphics available as WinBoard
.bmp files (which can also be converted to PNG by the Linux 'convert'
utility), in the WinBoard Zeta package, which contained a WinBoard fork.
The guy that made the fork refused to provide the source code, however, in
violation of the GPL. When I demanded it, he stopped distributing the
package rather than publishing the source of WinBoard Zeta.