On 2014-12-19 11:33 AM, Wayne Joseph wrote: > I could be misunderstanding, but this single line would seem to me to be > easier to copy and paste. I don't really see the value of separating them > onto two lines, especially as you explained that generally the position ID > is not very useful on its own (and I guess pasting the match position in on > its own is not that useful either).
I'll offer some insight on this. GNUbg has been around for a lot of years (late 90s)and parts of it have evolved and in some cases GNUbg legacies prompt this kind of discussion. In the old days (up to about the mid 2000's) the MatchID and PositionID were separated. If you were to download an old version of GNUbg from that era you had to enter the matchid and positionid separately on the GUI. Eventually some people viewed the two line display as cumbersome. GNUbg itself can parse multiline and single line (matchid:positionid). The problem is that some other software may only accept one or the other. Coincidentally this past month this issue came up again in this thread when using control-C to copy a position to the clipboard. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnubg/2014-11/msg00000.html Some people like it one way, some the other. Beyond our software others use these ids in their tools. Today I discovered that going to a one line combined ID (aka a GNUBGID) actually prevents mindcentergames.com board generator from working properly. It prefers the multiline Matchid/Positionid to be entered and will not accept it on one line (effectively making 1.04.001 copy GNUBGID incompatible) So try this. Go to http://www.mindgamescenter.com/#!bgdiagram: and enter an example: GNU Backgammon Position ID: DCBwdwcE8IE9Qw Match ID : cAngAAAAAAAA It should create the board diagram. Now try to enter the one line variant: DCBwdwcE8IE9Qw:cAngAAAAAAAA It will present an error "Incorrect XGID or GNUBg ID. Please use the instructions above." However if you remove the colon and put both parts of the id on separate lines it will work: DCBwdwcE8IE9Qw cAngAAAAAAAA In an ideal world all utilities should probably support both formats to stay compatible with older and newer versions of GNUbg. The mindgamecenter issue illustrates what happens when we make changes to the IDs. We may inadvertently be breaking existing tools that may expect things in a more specific format. I personally prefer the combined form: GNUBGID DCBwdwcE8IE9Qw:cAngAAAAAAAA -- Michael Petch GNU Backgammon Maintainer / Developer OpenPGP FingerPrint=D81C 6A0D 987E 7DA5 3219 6715 466A 2ACE 5CAE 3304 _______________________________________________ Bug-gnubg mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnubg
