h.g. muller wrote:
At 06:45 14-7-2009 -0600, Eric Mullins wrote:
I sort of agree the startup dialog is an abomination. But it does
make the program more friendly too. I just envision an extra script
included with the xboard package. Say 'xboard-startup', which we
could recommend to people having trouble running xboard proper. It
would gather information about how the user wants to run, and then
invoke xboard with the appropriate command line arguments to achieve
this. It could also add features the xboard program doesn't have
such as remembering board size preferences, fonts, etc. It could
become quite elaborate, though that wasn't my original vision.
That is one of my reservations. To not make it a half-hearted job that
is of no use to people anyway might require a real effort. IMO it is a
real problem that XBoad does not remember any of its settings,
although proper use of .Xdefaults (which I have no idea how to do as a
non-Linux user) does solve most of that.
.Xdefaults is what I use. The problem of course, is that regular users
don't know what that is, and are loathe to go that route even given a
concise example.
Basically, the design of xboard is fine for computer literate, but poor
for everyone else. Linux on the desktop is beginning to take hold,
though. So at least considering ease of use for neophytes makes some
sense. This is more important with the GTK+ version than with this
release, though.
Also, any such startup script can be easily distributed anytime, even
via email. So it's not a big deal to have this for release really.
Except it'd be nice to tell someone on a forum to 'just run
xboard-startup instead of xboard'. Heh.
I can never run XBoard without giving a -boardSize argument. The
start-up menu of WinBoard is only useful by virtue of the list of
pre-installed engines accessible through the combo box, which usually
do contain a number of WinBoard options that have to go with the
engine as well (such as /fd). If you would have to type the engine name
and parameters every time you start, you might as well have started
from the command line. The only thing the startup dialog generates
automatically is /fcp= and /scp= to amd those are not such a big deal
to type.
Btw, the Debian package does contain a file /usr/share/menu/xboard,
which seems to define a number of menu entries for XBoard in the
section Games/Board. Items to direcly logon to ICC, FICS, etc. When I
install the package, however, I don't get to see any of this. I do
have only a single menu entry, but it is directly in Games. It might b
a remnant of my 4.2.7 install. Does Ubuntu ignore the files in
/usr/share/menu? Where does it generate its menus from?
I think the menus depend a lot on which window manager you're running.
For Gnome, I know they are xml files automatically generated. I've read
they are some of the most complex things associated with Gnome.
I have an Xboard entry in my games menu-- a legacy tidbit of having once
installed 4.2.7 from a repository. I have a symlink in /usr/games to
whatever xboard I'm using. Right now it's pointing to my git tree, so
I'm always running the latest one from git. With the recent changes, I
don't appear to have reason to adjust it back to 4.2.7, something I had
been doing often before.
