Re: [XBoard-devel] XBoard dialogs

[Tim Mann]

Having a -soundDirectory option seems fine. A small detail: I think
-bitmapDirectory and -pixmapDirectory are prefixed whenever the
filename doesn't begin with a /, not when it doesn't contain a /. That
allows there to be subdirectories under the default directory, though
I don't think we currently do that.

It's annoying that Debian doesn't ship the standard sounds that come
in the xboard distribution. Maybe the Debian maintainer is unsure of
their copyright status.  (I must admit that's not totally clear. A few
I recorded myself, while others I grabbed from various web sites that
claimed they were free.) We could ask about that. I don't remember who
the Debian maintainer is for xboard.

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 11:41 PM, h.g. muller <address@hidden> wrote:
> I have a question about sound usage in XBoard. How is this typically done?
> In WinBoard thee are some 30 'built-in' sounds, which are an integral part
> of the executable (residing in the resource). For XBoard, however, the
> sounds
> are external files played by an external player program, and the binary
> Debian
> package does not contain any sounds at all.
>
> The question becomes relevant when designing a Sound Options menu dialog.
> It would be desirable to be able to select a number of standard sounds there
> through a combobox (like in WinBoard), by names like 'gong', 'thud' or
> 'phone'.
> The dialog should then know, however, what the corresponding filename is.
> I guess a likely place would be something like
> /usr/share/games/xboard/*.wav,
> but the exact place would likely be distribution and confguration dependent.
> That makes it undesirabe to hard-code the filenames in xoptions.c.
>
> I noticed that XBoard does not have someting like a -soundDirectory option
> (in analogy to -bitmapDirectory or -pixmapDirectory). Perhaps a first step
> in
> the right direction would be to implement this, and automatically prefix it
> to any sound-file name passed to the player program that doesn't contain
> any slashes. This could then be configured through the master settings file.
> User-suppled files would then have to contain at least one slash to dodge
> this
> mechanism, and would have to be given as "./xxx.wav" when in the current
> directory. (Which doesn't seem unnatural to me.) The filename of standard
> sounds selected through the combobox can then simply be "gong.wav" etc.
>
> Do we agree this is the bestway to implement it?
>
>
>