Re: [XBoard-devel] Installer

[h.g. muller]

> I don't see anything wrong with that.  I would prefer Htmlhelp over 
> Winhelp though when both can work.

This would be logical, except that the html help file initially was not as 
good as the old help file.
I think the work of Charles Browne largely corrected that, (at least, if he 
can also incorporate the
update we committed recently), but future updates might create differences 
again.
I am a bit hesitant to designate the file that is least likely to be 
up-do-date as the primary choice.


> They are just the files we use for building the installer.  So that they 
> are obsolete doesn't matter, they will always be the same ones as in the 
> current installer build.

I can imagine you would want to keep them there for documentation purposes 
once the installer is finished and released.
But what I was thinking is this: while we are working on it, the git cannot 
be used to pull our files from, as the files
are maintained by upstream developers who will not commit to our git. So if 
there is a difference between the files
in git and the files I obtain elsewhere, it is those in git that I should 
discard. But never mind.


> If there are legal issues with hosting those files in git, then I suggest 
> we not include them at all.  (on site, nor in the installer)
>
> Because of problems with various external programs, maybe it's best to 
> focus on winboard all by itself.  If you want to host your own "Gold Pack" 
> you still can.  What did 4.2.7 include?  Gnuchess, crafty, timeseal and 
> timestamp.
>
> Now that I think of it, I like this a lot.  Make winboard basically 
> standalone and thus a relatively small install file.

Except that "relatively small" in fact means more than 2x larger (5.9MB for 
4.2.7b vs 2.8MB for 4.4.0 as I have it now).
Most of it spend on components that were not really of much interest to any 
user. (Two mediocre Chess engines they
would never even have looked at if they did not come with WinBoard.) I 
think that is a really bad idea.

> That would allow you to make your Gold pack and not worry about legal 
> issues on git.  And anyone else with a different view of winboard use 
> could make his own package with external components.

Anyone can do that anyway. They could even regress to a package with GNU 
Chess + Crafty, not capable of running
UCI engines, and perhaps they will do just that. They could even host WB 
4.0.2, because they think it is the best
thing in the world. But I don't see any of that as a reason to not provide 
the best functionality we can from our own website.
Lack of a smart bundling strategy is the prime cause of the decline of 
WinBoard amongst Windows users. They move
to other GUIs that do provide all-in-one. People demand that nowadays.

About progress:

I think I have prepared all shortcuts now, and they appear nicely in the 
start menus with applicable icons.
They all appear to work (under XP). I have found a way to make a second 
level of sectioning in the components
selection page. So the primary menu now shows 4 selectable "profiles": 
Fruit, Xiangqi, Variants and TM.
The Xiangqi and Variants options can be expanded (I expect many people to 
simply deselect them without
looking), to show Graphics + two engines (XQ), or 3 Engines + 1 Adapter 
(Pulsar, Joker, ShaMax + Smifoglot).
I also made the list of Deletes and RMDirs for the un-installer.

There are a few ponts left to address:
* The update of the .chm help file.
* The combination of the new Polyglot with the included version of Fruit 
apparently exposes a bug in the
formatting of the Engine Settings dialog that was not apparent before 
(several Polyglot options appear
twice). I will have to debug that.
* When testing, the un-install failed several times because some files 
could not be deleted as they were "in use".
Later I discovered hanging Polyglot processes to be responsible. I am not 
sure yet if this is a genuine Polyglot
problem, or that it was cause because I am heavily overloading my laptop (I 
hve some 35 open windows,
and only 512MB RAM). I also found two hanging Fariry-Max processes (but 
they never lock anything).
I would like to check this out.
* I want to delete the page about PolyglotGUI from the html tutorial, and 
write a new one describing how to
use WinBoard for configuring UCI engines.