Failure to create opening book in GNU Chess 5.02

[David Madore]

Hi.

I tried to install GNU chess version 5.02 but failed in getting it to
create the opening book.

For one thing, the command "book create" indicated in the INSTALL file
does not do anything.  A cursory inspection of the sources showed that
"book add" should be used instead.  (Should I mention that silently
ignoring erroneous commands is bad UI policy?)

But this also fails with a segmentation fault:

brick madore /brick/madore/chess-5.02/src $ ./gnuchess
GNU Chess v5.02

Transposition table:  Entries=1024K Size=32768K
Pawn hash table: Entries=384K Size=24576K
White (1) : book add smallbook.pgn
Opened existing book!
zsh: segmentation fault (core dumped)  ./gnuchess
brick madore /brick/madore/chess-5.02/src $ gdb gnuchess core
GNU gdb 4.18
Copyright 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB.  Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "sparc-sun-solaris2.5"...
Core was generated by `./gnuchess'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation Fault.
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libm.so.1...done.
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libc.so.1...done.
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libdl.so.1...done.
Reading symbols from /usr/platform/SUNW,Ultra-1/lib/libc_psr.so.1...done.
#0  0xef6ef8b4 in fread () from /usr/lib/libc.so.1
(gdb) where
#0  0xef6ef8b4 in fread () from /usr/lib/libc.so.1
#1  0x15750 in BookBuilder ()
#2  0x2e4ac in BookPGNReadFromFile ()
#3  0x166fc in InputCmd ()
#4  0x29e2c in main ()
(gdb) quit
brick madore /brick/madore/chess-5.02/src $ uname -a
SunOS brick 5.5 Generic_103093-27 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-1
brick madore /brick/madore/chess-5.02/src $ gcc -v
Reading specs from /usr/local/lib/gcc-lib/sparc-sun-solaris2.5/2.95.2/specs
gcc version 2.95.2 19991024 (release)

It is hard to say more at the present.  However, I notice that you
distribute a binary book.dat file, and it seems to me that in reading
it you pay no attention to endianness (or word size, for that matter)!
Could it be that GNU chess only functions on the Intel architecture?

Yours truly,

-- 
     David A. Madore
    (address@hidden,
     http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/ )