RE: GNUbg development build

[Richard Buckle]

To the CVS repo? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought gnubg had migrated to Git and a repo on GitHub.

 

Genuine question.

 

 

From: Philippe Michel
Sent: 14 July 2023 22:41
To: bug-gnubg@gnu.org
Subject: GNUbg development build

 

I have uploaded a gnubg Windows build at

http://philippe.michel7.free.fr/gnubg/

 

The corresponding sources (with most changes not yet commited to the cvs

repository) and the translations' .po files are available there as well.

 

 

The most significant changes are contributions from Isaac Keslassy to

the match analysis features. His detailed description is appended to

this message.

 

- background analysis: the GUI is no longer frozen when an analysis is

launched, you can start browsing the moves list and checking analyses

immediately.

 

With its asynchronous behaviour, this may be the most bug-prone change

and the one that seems most important to test extensively.

 

- extensions to the previously relatively limited batch analysis

feature.

 

- large improvement the the existing (but almost undocumented and only

available from the CLI) possibility to always show a list of players at

the bottom of the board

 

 

Other less prominent features:

 

- Ukrainian translation has been added, but is currently empty. This is

mostly to help those who proposed adding it a few months ago to test

their work.

 

- an optional parameter has been added to the "new session" CLI command

to set the number of games to play. This will be mostly useful to set

gnubg vs. gnubg play, as suggested recently in bug-gnubg.

 

 

A few bug fixes:

 

- the crashes in evaluations higher than 4 ply, reported to the list,

should be fixed

 

- the quirk of having the higher die always shown to the left, reported

to rec.games.bakgammon, is fixed

 

- other less visible bugs, including crashes when the players names were

at the maximum supported lenghth

 

 

Misc. other points:

 

I named this 1.08-dev but the version change to 1.08 doesn't imply a

forthcoming new release.

 

The Windows file is an installer. I didn't bother any longer with a zip

file preserving a previous installation. It is easy enough to replace

back this by a regular release.

 

Msys2, used to build the Windows version, no longer supports Windows 7.

I left my build VM at an earlier version that still does. This shouldn't

matter much as long as there is no critical bug discovered in the tools

or libraries used to build gnubg,

 

The problems with 3D display on recent Linux distributions (more

precisely recent Mesa library versions) are still present.

 

 

 

From Isaac commits log:

 

There are several new features that enable users to streamline their use of gnubg.

For example, after a user plays a match on the internet, he now can click on a single

button, and gnubg will:

(1) automatically open his latest match,

 (2) automatically swap players and sit the user at the bottom of the board,

(3) automatically analyze this latest match in the background while the user checks

                                his mistakes in parallel,

(4) and automatically add the analysis results to the database.

 

 

DETAILS:

 

*** New "background analysis" and "smart analysis" features, together with two new

buttons in the main toolbar: "Analyze" and "Analyze File"

- 1st button: "Analyze":

    - This is to analyze the current match.

    - Define options for what it does (in Settings>Analysis):

        - "background analysis" checkbox:

            * unchecked => regular "analyze match" (blocking, like today), vs.

            * checked => we can browse at the same time and check the analysis

        - "automatic add-to-database" checkbox:

            * Unchecked = like today, vs

            * Checked = automatic add-to-db at end of analysis (and we remove the add-to-db

                button from the statistics page)

- 2nd button: "Analyze file":

    - This is for a file, e.g. a match that we just played online.

    - Can launch either one of 3 options (defined in Settings>Analysis):

        1) Regular "batch analysis": blocking, like today (+add-to-db)

        2) "Single-file analysis": analysis of 1 chosen file, can be in

            background and/or add-to-db based on defined settings

        3) "Smart analysis": pick the newest file in the preferred folder that gnubg

            recognizes, then can be in background and/or add-to-db based on defined settings

When analyzing in the background, various menus are disabled so the user does not launch

    another analysis in the middle.

 

*** New "smart open" feature that enables users to automatically to sit at the bottom of

the board (i.e. as player1) in opened matches.

   

It works as follows:

1) In Settings > Options > Display, the user can enable this option

2) The user can define "key player names" in two ways:

    a) Manually:

    In Settings > Options > Display, edit the list and add/delete names.

    b) Automatically:

    Each time te user swaps the player order to highlight some player

    and set this player at the bottom of the board, we add this

    player's name to the list.

3) When opening a new file, SmartOpen() automatically checks if player0

    is a key player while player1 is not. In such a case, it swaps

    their places.