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From: | Michel Van den Bergh |
Subject: | Re: [XBoard-devel] git issues |
Date: | Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:17:16 +0100 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (X11/20090817) |
h.g. muller wrote:
This seems to be a problem which should be fixed in this particular Tournament Manager.... I just checked the documentation of "tourney-manager" (which comes with Ubuntu) and it allowsI guess it does not really matter what the user specific configuration file is except I think it should definitely not be ./xboard.conf. That would mean that the xboard configuration would depend on the current directory which would lead to all kinds of surprizes (e.g. engines would use 64M hashin one directory and 128M hash in another directory).But that is exactly why I like it. I typically run WinBoard through a Tournament Manager, whichgives me no control on what is on the command line that invoked it.
straightforward control of xboard's command line arguments.
The customary way to deal with this situation is to provide xboard with a command line argument to select an alternative configuration file. This command line argument could be provided by the tournament manager.So the only way to controlthe WinBoard settings is to write them in the ini file in advance. And when I run two tournaments in paralel, one might need -variant gothic and the other -variant normal. There would be no way to do that if all invocations were forced to use the same ini file. (Even for WinBoard I can only do it by having two copies of winboard.exe, to have different install directories. Inelegant, butat least it works.)
As to the configuration problem: When the default settingsfile is /etc/xboard/xboard.conf, and the user will try to save the settings (and -saveSettingsOnExit true is compiled-in default...), it will either work, or he will get an error popup mentioning that this file could not be opened.
I guess it could be expected from Linux users that they then are smart enough to actually create the directory it is supposed to be in, and make it writable to them.A freshly installed user program that wants to write by default to a system configuration file (i.e. one in the /etc directory) would be *very* uncommon in Linux (and against the very idea of system configuration files which are supposed to be shared by all users).
There is usually system wide configuration file (or directory) created at install time and a user specific one created when the user runs the program for the first time. For example I have /etc/firefox-3.5 and ~/.mozilla/firefox-3.5/ (and I wouldn't expect firefox to dump a configuration file in every
directory I run it from....).In easy cases it is possible to dispense with the system wide configuration file.
We could also provide a "make install" target in the Makefile, which puts the directory there.
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