[XBoard-devel] Thoughts...

[Dan Jenkins]

I've been playing with adding an OpenGL interface to the code lately, and 
currently have got a version of that working fairly well.  It's not code I'd 
want to merge back into the main code, yet, though, since it currently is a 
compile-time setting to make it use OpenGL, and I think a run-time setting 
would be much more desireable.  Still, if anyone wants a look, I can throw a 
tarball up somewhere, or check it into CVS under a separate directory.

Anyway, I got to thinking of a couple of things and was wondering what 
others opinions are.  For the 3d models, I have some pieces that I threw 
together in Blender, and wrote an export script to export them to my own 
custom format, and then I have code that reads in that format.  These are 
data files that aren't compiled into the executable as resources, and as 
such, the app needs to know the path to look for them.  It appears that all 
of the graphics for xboard currently are included into the code as arrays, 
and thus, they are not loaded from disk at run-time as my 3d models would 
be.  I could write a utility to convert the models and textures to do 
something similar, but I don't like that idea, because I would like to 
eventually add code to allow users to import their own 3d chess sets.

So... what I was thinking is that there could be a central path somewhere to 
the files for all users, but the app could also check a directory in the 
user's home directory, so that users could get their own sets and wouldn't 
need root access to "install" them.  What I'm not sure about is what the 
best way to go about determining the central path would be.  It seems a lot 
of apps install themselves into /usr/local, so /usr/local/xboard would be an 
option, but I hate to hard-code paths like that, and would prefer to make it 
more configurable.  So... that gets back to the problem of the app needing 
to know what the install path was...  The app could look for a data 
directory in the same directory that the executable is, but that doesn't 
seem that good either, since then xboard would either need to be someplace 
other than /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin, or you'd have to have something like 
/usr/bin/xboard/data...  I suppose it would be possible to install the 
xboard executable into an install path like /usr/local/xboard, and then make 
a symlink to it in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin, though...  Any thoughts?  How 
do other linux apps that need to access data files generally do this?

Another thought I had was that, since it'd be nice to allow users to select 
their own chess sets, it'd also be nice to be able to save that information 
in something like a .xboardrc so that when they choose a different set, 
shutdown, and restart xboard, their latest settings are loaded again.  This 
could be nice not only for things like which chess set, but current options 
like the "highlight last move" option etc.  Currently, I know you can 
probably specify the options you want for everything on the command-line, 
and possibly by using the .Xdefaults file, but it seems it would be more 
user friendly to setup your options, and know that they will stay that way 
until you change them again.  But then, maybe that's just me being used to 
many Windows apps doing this...  What do you guys think?

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