Re: [XBoard-devel] Xboard 4.9 status?

[Joshua Pettus]

Congrats on Fairymax 5. I love the alliteration ;) !

All of that makes a lot of sense.

Another thing I’m starting to notice with your development version, the GUI 
opening book function doesn’t seem to override the engine like I expect,  and 
appears rather broken.   I tried various opening books and had the same result. 
 I go to common engine, check Use GUI Book,  select a book, and uncheck Engine 
1 and 2 have opening books.  The engines then move as if there were no book.  
4.8.0 this worked fine. 

I know I mentioned this before,  I still kinda like to see common engine moved 
to the engine menu with first and second engine settings.  To me, it seems less 
confusing, at least from a practical standpoint.  In my eyes its less of an 
xboard settings menu and more directly effects how engines behave.  Or maybe 
move engine 1 and 2 settings menus to options as they are really options menus. 
 Either way, some consistency is needed, as those three menus go together.

What do you think?

Josh


> On Jan 26, 2016, at 4:58 PM, H.G. Muller <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Well, I just released Fairy-Max 5.0. So I can concentrate on XBoard now.
> 
> In intensively using the latter during Fairy-Max development, I noticed a few 
> glitches:
> - Right-clicking in the engine-output window on a PV to walk it as a 
> 'variation board' is a bit sick for me. It is supposed to highlight the 
> currently walked PV in yellow (GTK version). It actually does that, and 
> removes the highlight when you terminate the PV walk by releasing the mouse 
> button. BUT ONLY THE FIRST TIME! When I then right-click that same PV again, 
> there is no highlight. When I click another one I did not click before, there 
> again is.
> - Sometimes when I am PV walking, the entire content of the pane is cleared 
> when a new PV comes in. I could not find any systematics in that. I wonder if 
> these two problems are simply bugs in my GTK library. Do people with more 
> recent Linux versions than I have have any of these problems?
> - In Edit Position mode, sometimes strange things happen: a piece that I 
> move, suddenly re-appears at the square I took it from. I have not had time 
> to figure out what causes this.
> - When I start XBoard with a -loadPositionFile argument, it starts with a 
> message 'White to play', which it doesn't display later, when I start another 
> game. It also does not accept a sequence of moves pasted into it in that 
> state, which it does on later games. So it is in some sort of incorrect state 
> at this point. I want to fix that too.
> - Tamerlane Chess has all Pawns promote differently, which basically makes 
> them different piece types. There is no good support for that in XBoard yet, 
> and Evert Glebbeek has written a Tamerlane Chess engine. I am thinking of 
> adding support for this in the pieceToCharTable, where a piece that has a 
> hyphen defined as ID for it will be considered a Pawn (i.e. no piece ID used 
> for it in SAN), and would be indicated as the piece to which it promotes 
> (according to the XBoard pairing rule for promoted and unpromoted types) 
> prefixed with a - in FEN.
> - I am unhappy that <Enter> does not act as accelerator for 'OK' in dialogs 
> when you are typing in a (single-line) text-entry field in GTK. Perhaps the 
> GenericPopup dialog constructor should add an event handler for this to all 
> text entries.
> 
> Otherwise we seem to be OK.
> 
> Op 1/26/2016 om 8:25 PM schreef Joshua Pettus:
>> Hey Everyone,
>> 
>> I’m just wondering where we are at.  Now that we got those last bugs fixed, 
>> where are we at with 4.9? Is there anything else we would want to include? 
>> Do we have a target date in mind?  Should we put out a few beta builds?  I 
>> still have a few mac related patches on Arun’s branch.  I could put them on 
>> Savannah myself now if that’s ok with everyone?
>> 
>> Best Regards,
>> Josh Pettus
>> 
> 
>