[XBoard-devel] Re: Some development on Winboard

[Tim Mann]

Hi, Alessandro.  Thanks for the mail.  I've been busy with other things
and spending basically no time on xboard/WinBoard, so I didn't get
around to replying until now -- sorry.  I also haven't looked at your
code, but the features sound nice.

As you can tell from a message he sent a few hours ago, Daniel Mehrmann,
one of the other folks on the project, wants to work on integrating your
code, so fortunately I'm not a complete bottleneck.

Because xboard is an official GNU project, the Free Software Foundation
wants to own the copyright to all code that we put into releases.  So
for us to use your code in a future release, we need to get you to
donate it to the FSF by signing some paperwork (on real physical paper)
and mailing it to the FSF offices.  I'll send you info on that in a
separate message.


On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 10:56:50 -0500, "Alessandro Scotti" <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Tim,
> in the last week I have worked a little on Winboard, starting from the
> public 4.2.7 sources. The reason is that Winboard does most of the
> things I need, but not all. Also, it's starting to look a bit outdated
> with respect to more recent GUIs.
> For now I have added the following features:
> - can convert engine scores from "absolute" to "relative";
> - can save score and depth for each move in PGN games;
> - can hide the engine PV when playing against human, yet save it in the
> log file;
> - fixed (I hope) a thread initialization problem and some buffer overflows;
> - can paste from the clipboard with Ctrl-V either a FEN or a PGN;
> - can render board squares using textures;
> - can render chess pieces using fonts.
> There is a screenshot here:
> http://www.ascotti.org/programming/chess/zip/xboard4.jpg 
> and all modified sources as well as a compiled version here:
> http://www.ascotti.org/programming/chess/zip/winboard_x.zip
> If you have time and interest, I could definitely use a code review. I
> tried to be cautious and to code "defensively", which means code could
> be slightly less clean at times but hopefully less bug prone, as after
> all I could only get a limited understanding of the program in so little
> time.
> I have still some items on my todo list, e.g. separate time controls for
> the two players, and I'll probably try to explore adding a "setoptions"
> command to the protocol, as that seem to be very useful for the
> non-technical user that has to configure an engine.
> I posted some reports on this development here:
> http://volker-pittlik.name/wbforum/viewtopic.php?t=1949
> and so far haven't received bugs.
> It would be great to hear what you think and whether you consider it
> interesting to merge those changes in the "main" version. Thanks for a
> great program anyway!
> Best regards,
> 
> Alessandro Scotti
> 


-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/