Re: [XBoard-devel] Installer

[Eric Mullins]

Arun Persaud wrote:
> Eric wrote:
>   
> > Face it.  Winboard is an advanced program for relatively advanced 
> > users.  You can try to make it easier for them by bundling, but I 
> > don't  think that's really the job of the winboard project.  And I don't 
> > see it  having any significant impact on "winboard market share."  I'm not 
> > sure  that's really a concern of the winboard project anyway.
> >     
>
> Since I'm only using xboard, my opinion doesn't really count I guess ;) anyway, 
> the way I see it is that bundling a lot of extra software in a nice installer 
> can't hurt and it seems as if you already got most of it bundled and HGM seems 
> to have finished the gold-pack(tm) installer. Seems like the effort wasn't 
> really that much to get the installer working, so I say we should use it...
>   

My problem is just associating the winboard project with extras that we 
need permission to bundle or to host on git.  I don't have any problem 
with the installer itself  (I'm happy to assist when possible).  I have 
less problem with software we don't need permission to distribute, but 
still that includes timestamp and timeseal which are both closed source.

Basically by bundling, we are tying winboard with certain software, 
essentially choosing which versions to include.  I realize end users can 
change, for example, polyglot to one they like better.  But this 
situation is analogous  to  Microsoft bunding IE.   Other browsers are 
hurt that way.   Similarly, other polyglot forks suffer if we decide to 
make our own custom one.  This is a different problem than requiring 
permission, but equally valid, IMO.

> One question would be if we should use the GNU homepage to ship the installer 
> or if we should just put winboard.exe up there and have a link to the WBforum 
> (or some other place) for the gold-pack(tm) installer (and tell everyone to use 
> that link)... that way we would run into no problems with GNU and non-GNU 
> software. Might be the cleanest solution if it is ok to host the installer on 
> the forum... which I guess should be ok, since the old versions of winboard 
> were available through it too AFAIK.
>   

My recommendation would be to not ship the installer, or ship one more 
like 4.2.7 which carries no distribution issues.  Plugging the Gold Pack 
on the website seems fine to me though.  Ideally, creating task oriented 
tutorials should be present on the website.  [How to run an engine on 
FICS.  How to run an engine tournament.  How to run UCI engines, and 
maybe even specific howtos for some commercial engines, etc.]