Re: [XBoard-devel] Connecting to ICS through gateway broken?

[h . g . muller]

> Interestingly, the current command line parsing rejects "" for some
> reason:
>
>
> $ xboard -gateway localhost -ics -icshost freechess.org -remoteUser ""
> xboard: No value provided for argument -remoteUser
>
>
> That's a bug too -- "" is an empty string; it's not "no value".

This is not something we can help. It is the shell that does this. Empty
strings in the settings file work perfectly. So the internal parser seems
OK.

I agree this is very annoying. Just like it is annoying in WinBoard that
newer Windows versions do not display shortcut 'target' lines beyond the
first @-sign. So when I distribute shortcuts in the binary install that
have "winboard.exe @xq.ini" because they need so many arguments (line a
new list of /firstChessProgramNames for Xiangqi engines) that they wuld
exceed the maximum allowed command-line length, so that I have to pass
them in an indirection file, people that open the shortcut just see
"winboard.exe", and have no idea why it does what it does. (And worse,
when they then close the "properties" dialog with "OK" in stead of
"cancel", they actually break it.)

I am not sure what to do about this. Complaining to MicroSoft that the @
sign in shortcuts did not display, evoked the brilliant response that we
could use a character other than '@'...

So it seems that if we want to fix those issues, we should indeed define a
synonym for '@' as indirection symbol (or perhaps make it configurable for
backward compatibility, by adding a comand-line option -atSign "#" that we
could use in the master-settings file to define the alternative.

And for the Linux empty-string problem, we could (say) define _EMPTY_ as a
keyword representing an empty string, so it could be passed on the command
line.