Hi, These ideas sounds excellent.
Currently -firstChessProgramNames is not documented at all. It should be. It would also be very nice to be able to view and edit all things in the list inside xboard.
The name "firstChessProgramNames" seems odd to me. Why isn't it simply "engineList" or something like that? You can select both first and second engine from it in the "Load engine"-window. You could even add "Analysis engine" to the combo box.
- Byrial Den 03-01-2012 16:40, h.g. muller wrote:
I agree, but would prefer names like -userConfigDir and -userConfigFileWell, these would be good names too. But somehow I have the feeling that we would be setting up something quite complicated to acheive something rather ordinary. Can't we really think of something simpler? If we want to solve this by new XBoard options, there could be easier and more versatile ways to do it. For instance: Currently we only have -ncp, -ics and engine (-fcp) mode, all having a very specific fuction. How about adding a somewhat less specified mode -pgn (or -viewer), which either defaults to -ncp or engine mode, depending on the persistent setting of another option. Users do already maintain a list of engines in -firstChessProgramNames, in a format that allows them to accompany each engine by a set of XBoard options to be used with that engine. We could add an option -analysisEngine, which stores a sigle 'engine line' in the same format. Or better yet, stores the (nick)name of the engine in the -firstChessProgramNames to be used for this purpose, so that people would not have to do double installs. When started up in -pgn mode (which the desktop file associated with PGN files would then always do), XBoard could then scan through the -firstChessProgramNames string to find a match with -analysisEngine. If there was none, (or -analysisEngine was empty), it would start in -ncp mode, while in case of a match it would process the corresponding engine line in -firstChessProgramNames (as WinBoard does for the engine selected by the startup-dialog combobox, or would happen when you select an engine through the Load Engine dialog) as if it were appended to the command line. The user could then include the options needed for tailoring the window conformation he wants with the engine, as options in the engine line overrule those on the command line. So the pgn-viewer.desktop file would use a command tailored to the assumption that -pgn would default to -ncp, e.g. xboard -pgn -engineOutputUp false -evalGraphUp false. The user could then install an engine as -firstChessProgramNames {.... ... "Stockfish-ana" -fcp "stockfish" -engineOutputUp true -evalGraphUp true -initialMode AnalyzeMode ... } and run XBoard once as xboard -analysisEngine "Stockfish-ana" to persistently configure stockfish with this windows conformation as PGN viewer.
