> at the moment xboard is looking for fairymax as a chess engine when you > start it without any options, which probably results in an error on most > system. Should we change it, so that it tries a bunch of common engines > (if called without -fcp, say fairymax, crafty, gnuchess) and if it > doesn't find any goes into EditGame mode? > > Think that might be a better default.
It would definitely make more sense if non-existence of the firstChessProgram only leads to an error if you actually try to use that engine (like is already the case for the secondChessProgram). Unfortunately XBoard is written in such a way that it tries to use the firstChessProgram (if there is one) all the time. Even in Edit Game mode or when Observing ICS games. (I already partly suppressed that, for it made no sense that you could not observe, say, a Crayzyhouse game when logged in in zippy mode with an engine that could play only normal.) It is also not so easy to change mode to -ncp on a failure to start-up the engine, as this failure is discoverd after the child is forked off to run the engine. So it is not a simple change, and I'd rather not mess with it so close before release. I don't think -ncp would be the best default mode to start in. If you have an engine installed, you usually want to load it (when not using -ics mode). XBoard has always had this problem that a missing engine causes a startup error, so people will be used to it. Therefore I'd rather leave the fix for a future version, where we can fundamentally solve it by allowing engine replacement at run time.
