I already raised this point in a private mail to Arun, but I would
like to put it up for
discussion in public. It is about the bundling strategy used for the
distribution of the
WinBoard executable. For XBoard this is not an issue, as Linux users
do not
appreciate bundling and rely on the package depency mechanism to
acquire their
software. But for WinBoard bundling is really essential, as Windows
users are in
general tot capable to install anything that does not come with the
initial install.
So important components, like Polyglot, must not be missing. In
addition, we should
provide data files for some of the new features to be usable in the
install, such as
bitmaps for the board texture, and an opening book.
From the e-mail extchange between Arun and me:
------------------------ quote -----------------------
> I think 4.2.8 comes with some sort of windows installer, do you know
anything about this?
I have seen that, and I guess I have even used it first time I
installed WinBoard on
one of my systems (which must have been in 2006). But I positively
hate installers,
and since that first install, I only copy winboard.exe files from one
PC to another.
(Note that I did ignore the entry where Chessknight did the initial
logging of the
installer files in the CVS.)
Anyway, the way the installer would install WinBoard on a Windows PC
looks nothing
like the way I distribute WinBoard 4.3.15. For one, it contains the
GNU Chess engines,
which I think we should really abandon. GNU Chess might have been of
interest and even
instrumental at the conception of XBoard, but today it is just a
mediocre Chess engine
amongst many hundreds. It is not particularly good (there are free
engines that are
more than 500 Elo stronger, even as open source), it is not
particularly small, (strongly
driving up the size of the download), it does not play any variants
except 'normal'...
So to dump not one, but even two versions of it on every WinBoard user
is really silly.
OTOH, much of the essential supporting software is missing in the
4.2.7 install. Poor
bundling is one of the main causes of the demise of WinBoard as main
Chess interface
on Windows. For the average Windows user that would benefit from an
installer, having
to download supporting software is a real show stopper, as in general
they would not
know where to find it, or where to put it to make it work with
WinBoard. So they cannot
run any UCI engines because they lack Polyglot. They cannot run engine
tournaments
because they lack a Tournament Manager. So they turn to other GUIs
that have these
functions as intrinsic features.
For this reason we created the 'WinBoard Gold Pack', (downloadble from
WinBoard forum)
which contains a complete installation tree of ready-to-run
executables, containing not only
WinBoard (as executable), but aso Polyglot, PSWBTM, an opening book,
an example
WB engine and an example UCI engine, example bitmap files for board
textures, PGN
and EPD files with test positions, etc. In other words, all the stuff
they badly need, in stead
of the stuff they don't care about from the 4.2.7 installer package.
As example WB engine in the Gold Pack I use Fairy-Max, because:
1) it is tiny (some 100KB uncompressed including all docs, only 35KB
for the engine proper).
2) it plays many variants next to noarmal Chess (Gothic Chess,
Shatranj, Courier Chess etc.).
----------------- end of quote --------------
So I want to propose a new bundling strategy for WinBoard 4.4.1
(compared to 4.2.7), abandoning
GNUChess, including Polyglot and an opening book, and perhaps a
true-type Chess font
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