h.g. muller wrote:
Specifying an engine name would be equivalent to specifying a save
file in your proposal.
I preferred specifying an engine name since it is completely generic.
It has a meaning for all types
of engines and people are familiar with the concept.
But if you want to specify a (polyglot specific) save file on the
command line then fine.
I am not sure I understand what you mean here. Are you referring to
the Polyglot command line
or the WinBoard command line?
The template by which polyglot is invoked.
In any the case it seems to me the template should then contain a
provision to include the name of the
savefile, e.g. -sf <SaveFile> (instead of -en <EngineName>)
I assume you do not want to force the user to start WB and go to some
dialog to select a new
SaveFile each time. Specifying it on the command line is faster and
less confusing.
What I had in mind was that people could start a UCI engine by
specifying the executable
in the normal way with -fcp and -fd, only adding the -fUCI flag to
tell WB an adapter should be invoked.
This can obviously only work if there is only one version of that
engine, because it would use
the default settings file for that engine. This could contain
customized settings or not. In the latter
case it would not even have to pre-exist.
In the (less usual) case that people want to experiment with multiple
settings, they cannot use this
simple -fUCI mechanism, they would somehow have to identify which
settings file is to be used.
In the pre-4.4 era, people did this by running with -fcp "polyglot
mypolyglot.ini".
That seems simple enough, and is actually hard to beat. So why change it?
Ok. I was always under the impression that the aim was to create some
generic mechanism by which the user
would be unaware that PG is being used internally to handle UCI
engines. Apparently
this was a communication problem.
//
