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Re: [XBoard-devel] git issues


From: h.g. muller
Subject: Re: [XBoard-devel] git issues
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:43:17 +0100

I am close to porting argument parsing and saving from WinBoard to XBoard.
But I am still in doubt how to do this. In WinBoard we have the concept of
an installDirectory, which is obtained from the registry, and the settings file
(winboard.ini by default) is made there. I guess the Linux counterpart of this
would be /usr/share/games/xboard. But I am not sure if this would be the
ideal place to create an xboard.ini file: the user might not have write permission
to this directory. (This also starts to become a problem in WinBoard, btw:
if WinBoard is installed in the /Program Files subtree in Vista, it refuses to
create files in its installation folder!)

Would it be better to create a settings file in the current directory, or in the
users home directory? Perhaps we should define installDir[] = "~/.xboard"
(and create that if it doesn't exist, when we save settings)? That could then
become the default place for the debug file, and saveGameFile as well.
Of course we could also keep everything in the current directory, so the user
can controll where the files are made when he starts from the command line.
That would displace the problem of defining a default directory to the shortcut
people would use when starting from the emnu or clicking an icon, however.

Is it an idea to work with two xboard.ini files? After setting the compiled-in
defaults, XBoard could read /usr/share/games/xboard/xboard.ini to overrule
them by system-wide defaults, and after that ./xboard.ini or ~/xboard.ini
to overrule them with user-customized settings. (And after that of course
the command line would have its say.) When the user saves settings,
he would save in the latter. (But by default, the system-wide settings
would turne saveSettingsOnExit off.) The system-wide settings file
would never be saved, unless a user with admin rights would exxplicitly
mention the path name in an -ini command-line option (or copy it there).

The more I think about it, the more I prefere using ./xboard.ini as default
user settings file over ~/xboard.ini.




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