Re: [XBoard-devel] Hi from a new member of the xboard team

[Arun Persaud]

Hi

> It would nice to have a roadmap for the development of xboard.

I guess at the moment we have a long term goal, which is to merge
Winboard and XBoard sources by porting the front end to GTK (at least
this is one of my major motivations). For this HGM slowly separated the
frontend and backend code better to make this easier and we started to
work on a GTK branch. This branch is, thanks to lots of work from John,
now a quite advanced, but still needs more work. The main issue here (as
mostly everywhere) is having enough time to work on it...

Otherwise we add features when we need them or when people suggest them
to us. We also try to keep the list of reported bugs small (see bug
tracker on Savannah). Unfortunately, we don't have a huge team of
testers and don't get that much feedback overall and we could always
need more developers :) I have been trying to advertise for more help
recently, but I would say with only moderate success...

I would greatly appreciate any effort that makes the code more readable
or maintainable, same for adding more comments to the code, which I
guess helps both... One of the main motivation for me for this would be
to lower the barrier for people to join the team and/or submit patches.

As for coding standards I think it would be great, if we could unify the
code. There is
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html
and since XBoard/Winboard is part of GNU, it would be great if we could
implement these more ;)

As for short term development, I would be fine to add those changes to
master (and from there to the gtk-branch and v4.6.x). There is really no
big rush to release the next version as far as I'm concerned and since
the next planned version would be a jump from 4.5.x to 4.6.x this could
include lots of the cleanup effort.

Arun