I put them there as a hack to use when experimenting with engines that accept extra nonstandard commands, and initially they were deliberately undocumented. You definitely can remove them.
On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 3:30 AM, h.g. muller <[email protected]> wrote: > Unfortunately one of my patches broke something. > I overlooked that Arun had also assigned the direct engine commands > to Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2, so when I re-assiged Ctrl+. to <Enter> I commented > out Aruns changes to read out the Ctrl key, because I thought all > 'non-existing' > Ctrl combination had been gone, and I wated to avoid unnecessary X-server > calls. > > These lines should be uncommented again. > > That is, if we really want to keep those commands. WinBoard does not have > them, > and IMO allowing the user to send an arbitrary string to the engine serves > little > other purpose than giving him unlimited power to wreck things. It is > something > you would do as a hack at a time where the protocol is very incomplete and > poorly defined, so that many engines support lots of features not > supported by > the protocol, all in a different way. But the current protocol is well > developed, > and should allow an engine author to implement any feature he wants using > standard protocol (through option features) with nice support in GUI > dialogs. > So there is no need for these direct commands, and their existence could > encourage engine authors to make their engines depend on them, rather > than using standard protocol. > > So I propose to remove the key bindings, or even to drop them altogether. > In that case the Ctrl-key lines can remain commented. > >
