Re: [XBoard-devel] new developer release out

[h . g . muller]

Op Di, 15 maart, 2016 3:38 am schreef Arun Persaud:
>
> fixed it in the configure file. We now check for pangocairo, which seems
> to fix the problem over here. Not sure if we need a minimum version for
> it? If so, let me know which one and I can add that too.
>

I don't expect that, as I am using it only for the most basic thing:
rendering a UTF8 character. Unfortunately Cairo's toy text interface could
not do that.

>
> Pushed the change to master. I accidentally forwarded first to
> hgm/master so those commits also ended up in git, but I guess that should
> be ok.
>

Well, they won't break anything, but were still a bit rought. What is your
opinion on the display of the startup message? I am starting to think it
might be too intrusive, and raise the annoyance level unacceptably. So it
would be better when the message would stop appearing once the user has
confirmed he understood it by using the feature.

This could be achieved by having a persistent string option -oldMessage,
which would be set to the displayed message whenever the user uses a help
click. And messages equal to -oldMessage would not be displayed. With this
way of disabling, message display would automatically resume when the
message changes. The message itself should of course also be made
configurable, so that it could be changed in future versions, by
specifying it in the master settings file.

This could be made even smarter in the future, to allow for multi-purpose
messages that should be disabled in parts by different user actions: each
text line in the configured message could be sought as a sub-string of the
-oldMessage option, and display of that line could be suppressed if there
is a match. XBoard could then be hard-coded to append the relevant line to
the -oldMessage option (if it did not occur in it already) when the user
performs the corresponding action.