Well the single most important thing is the PV. So additional thinking
output should
not make the PV scroll away. For WB could treat some type of thinking
output differently
but that would not help people using Arena or older version of Winboard.
But I guess this could be protected by a feature option.
Feature options are designed for modulating the behavior of the GUI, but
not so suitable for
implementing the behavior of the engine. Of course the engine could send a
feature to see
if the GUI rejects it. But there is no need to create a new feature for
that; there exist plenty
of features already that would be rejected by obsolete GUIs.
I don't think losing the 12 characters from the PV because it is prefixed
with something like
[1/20 a2a3] could be considered as breaking proper operation. There are
plenty of WinBoard
engines that already print stuff there now (including smileys, even!). I
think it would be best
to leave the decision to the engine author if he wants to make use of this
formerly not provided
feature of having current move and move number displayed during normal
search (as opposed
to analysis) in WinBoard, or squeeze out a few extra characters of PV under
Arena.
And there should be no excuse to use older versions of WinBoard.
