Re: [XBoard-devel] Future plans

[h.g. muller]

> And what would be the default name of the SaveFile be then? If it is not 
> derived from
> the engine name, what then?

The default would remain the engine name. If the user does not specify a
settings file, the name the engine reports would be used to derive the name
for a settings file. And it would also be the name reported to WB,
possibly with modifier suffix. If the user would explicitly give the name of
a settingsfile as Polyglot argument, that name would be used to pass
to WB. Normally users would only do that when they cannot use the
default name because it is already taken by another version of the engine.

> And how would the user change it? By a command line option or some input 
> field in the
> engine settings dialog? This would just be a different way of creating an 
> alternative engine name
> which is logically equivalent to my proposal I think.

Both methods could be usd to change it, and I guess changing it through the 
dialog would
also force resending of the myname feature. Just as resending the myname 
feature
(to append the modified suffix) would be necessitated by changing any of 
the other
option settings.

It is logically equivalent to your proposal only for UCI engines. WB engines
would remain fully in control of their own name.

> Debugging in WB and polyglot is an exceptional situation.
>
> You turn on debugging if something goes wrong and then it seems easiest to me
> to generate all debug information at once.  If for some reason this is not 
> what
> you want (which I think is not very likely) then you could always change 
> the template
> by which PG is invoked to sever the link between the two.

Well, this is a moot point I guess. Even the compiled-in defaults do not 
mean a whole
lot as I usually provide WinBoard completely installed with an ini file, 
and it would
be the contents of the ini file that mattered. For XBoard that is (still) a 
bit different,
though. My preference would be to keep things as simple as possible, and the
typical user wil be someone who apt-got xboard, apt-got glaurung, apt-got 
polyglot,
and now wants to play Chess. No debugging will or should be needed. For the
benifit of that kind of user I would like the default adapterCommand to be 
as simple
as possible. This would make life easier when he wants to change it (e.g. 
replace
polyglot by UCCI2WB). This is more likely than that he would ever have to 
debug.
Advanced users would know what to do anyway.