Benoit St-Pierre wrote:
Hi!
> At least three persons in a chess forum told me that they
> will stick to Chessdb as long as they can upload and
> append PGN games directly into their chess database.
You can't hinder them...
> I know there was a problem with implementing that in Scid,
No, not really a problem. Technically it's trivial. It gets
a bit involved if you want to have ongoing games appended to
your database ie. add single moves or subsequences of moves
to already existing games, that's actually what you need for
CC gameplay.
> as TWIC did not say it was ok to hook Scid to its site.
> Or something like that. Anyway.
No, it was not a problem of a site not allowing it
explicitly. It is just: you'll have to write some code to
fetch the game and if the site changes it's format things
are broken again. BTW: does ChessDB currently work with TWIC? I
have such a fetch script hacked together, but I had to adopt
it recently. Given that ChessDB is dead...
> Here are my questions :
>
> 1. What would be your favorite script (Linux, Mac and
> Win)?
Tcl fetching directly in Scid with a nice GUI to specify the
sources to use. Again, fetching the stuff is simple. It gets
involved once you want to extract the PGN and add it to your
courrent base without introducing duplicate games.
> 2. Should we ask TWIC again?
IMHO not needed at all. But I don't see why Mark would
refuse.
> 3. If we had an ok, would it be tough to implement?
It is actually trivial.
BUT: there is currently no defined interface for these
things. Therefore you'll have to do a specific script for
each site you want to consider. And you'd have to either
invent a pretty complex parser that allows the user to
specify how to handle the site or you have to hardcode
things in Scid. The latter is considered broken by design.
Especially if you don't talk about persistent sites.
Just to name a view points: TWIC used some internal path in
the ZIP files for some time while it was skipped later on,
reintroduced and seems to have gone again, now. All file
names are given in sequence and called twic<number>g.zip
containing the PGN. Trivial to do, but...
The structure of ChessCafe is quite different. The file is
always called Default.zip and covers some undefined time
frame. The ZIP again contains a pgn file to unpack and load
into Scid.
From ICCF Webchess on the other hand you get a single PGN
for each game.
Conclusion: there're far to many different ways to handle
PGN donwload to have a general interface PLUS you have no
way to tell if any of the things you do today will work
tomorrow. So keeping things up to date is considered
troublesome.
IMHO it would even be better to set up a webservice
somewhere that collects the games from the various sites and
offers them for download via some webservice/soap-calls.
Then we could add a simple inferface to Scid that allows to
select certain collections that get fetched to the local
database. Something similar to RSS for chess games.
Another option would be to have such fetch scripts done in
some sort of plugin architecture. But that approach didn't
get to much positive response when I suggested it way back.
BTW: Actually, I find it even more convenient to fetch TWIC
by number exteral to Scid and just incorporate it's updates
once a year as this is much easier to keep duplicate free.
(TWIC sometimes contains a bunch of dupes I found.)
BTW/2: as I named it, current cvs of CC code allows to watch
games life on ICCF. This is actually even more involved that
just fetching a pgn file and adding games to an existing
database ;)
--
Kind regards, / War is Peace.
| Freedom is Slavery.
Alexander Wagner | Ignorance is Strength.
|
| Theory : G. Orwell, "1984"
/ In practice: USA, since 2001
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