Re: [XBoard-devel] mime types

[h.g. muller]

At 17:21 21-6-2011 -0700, Arun Persaud wrote:
> Hi
>
> think I found out how to make xboard open certain file types
> automatically... you have to register mime-types and I found a program
> on the build server that does that, so now I can look into adding this
> to xboard... are we talking only *fen and *png or are there other file
> types?

*trn (for tournament files) would be the third type, in the master branch.
It should invoke the xboard wih the command

xboard -mm -ncp -tf FILE -saveSettingsOnExit false

where FILE is the clicked file. For *pgn this should be

xboard -ncp -lgf FILE -engineOutputUp false -saveSettingsOnExit false

and for *fen

xboard -ncp -lpf FILE -engineOutputUp false -saveSettingsOnExit false

(so -lpf in stead of -lgf). We could consider to put the arguments for the
latter two in a settings file, .../xboard/viewer.ini, so that we could 
abbreviate
their command lines to

xboard @viewer -lpf FILE
xboard @viewer -lgf FILE

respectively. I do something similar in WinBoard. For the *trn this could be

xboard @tourney -tf FILE

The idea is that the user then can more easily add his preferred settings
for these specialized applications in the ini files, like window layout,
board size, etc., which might be different from when he uses xboard with
engine. (Or in stead of -ncp in viewer mode he could automatically load
his favorite analysis engine with it, or have the Eval Graph window closed,
rather than open, because he uses it only to view human games, etc.)

I realize it would be better if such altered preferences would reside somewhere
in the user's private files. Perhaps we should introduce yet another variant
of the -settingsFile option family, one similar to @, except that it would not
trigger any error when the mentioned target would not exist (e.g. 
"-optOpt", for
"optional option file"). We could then configure mime-type associations like

xboard @viewer -optOpt ~/.xboard/viewer -lpg FILE

system wide, and when a user would like to mess with the preferences,
he would only have to place a viewer.ini file in his private ~/.xboard 
direcory.
The -optOpt could be put in the sysem viewer.ini as well, I suppose.


> also not sure when I will have time to actually do it, but it might have
> to wait until after the conference... i.e. July

Well, there is no hurry. It would be nice to have this in the next major
user relase (4.6.0?), but that is probably still a few months away.


> ARUN