[XBoard-devel] theme packages

[h . g . muller]

I just thought of a nice XBoard feature:

I defined a special string option -do "COMMAND", which is only recognized
as a first option, similar to --version and --help, which immediately quit
XBoard. What it does is expand a "%s" occurring in "COMMAND" to the path
name of the directory where it stores its data files (e.g.
/usr/local/share/games/xboard), and then offers it to the shell for
execution through system("EXPANDEDCOMMAND");.

E.g. if you would write

xboard -do "echo %s"

it would print the path to its data directory.

This can be used in install scripts of 'support packages' for XBoard, such
as theme packages with SVG pieces or board textures, to figure out where
they would have to copy the data files they contain. The make-install
could contain commands

xboard -do "cp *.svg %s/themes/xiangqi"
xboard -do "cp xq.xop %s/themes/conf"
xboard -do "cp xqboard.png %s/themes/textures"

and XBoard itself would be used to figure out where to copy the files to.
You would not have to worry whether the active XBoard would use
/usr/share/games/xboard or /usr/local/share/games/xboard, or whatever was
usual in the applicable Linux distro. Invoking xboard as a command would
always give you the active XBoard, and it would know.