Re: [XBoard-devel] Installer

[h.g. muller]

At 06:53 24-8-2009 -0600, Eric Mullins wrote:
> This is it in a nutshell: I discovered we are bundling extras for which we 
> can't just do anything we want with.  That's my main concern, but it also 
> led me down a path of questioning the wisdom of bundling anything at all, 
> even stuff we can do what we want with.
>
> I'm not concerned with file sizes.  I never once mentioned that as an issue.

Oh, I must have misunderstood then what you meant by "relatively small 
install file". Perhaps you meant small functionality...

> Now that I think of it, I like this a lot.  Make winboard basically 
standalone and thus a relatively small install file.

As I said, we can do both, one doesn't have to exclude the other. We seem 
to have different priorities:
You say: if some important enhancement of functionality could not be stored 
in git, we should not provide the functionality.
I would in that case say: then we don't store it it git.
My aim is to provide functionality to WinBoard users. Not to increase usage 
of git.

Fortunately there currently don't seem to be important problems in this 
respect. I am pretty sure that most people who
gave permission to distribute their stuff would not mind at all if it is 
also downloadable from the git repository.

In fact most of the stuff we do include is GPL's or has even less 
restrictions (open-source freeware). Much of what is
closed source is actually my own. That leaves only Pulsar. Perhaps Sjeng 
would have been a better choice. (Except
that it doesn't play Atomic, and I really like Atomic most of all ICC 
variants.) But Mike Adams (Pulsar author) was very
helpful in debugging WB in combination with all the weird variants Pulsar 
plays, and is actually eager to see it
optionally distributed with WB. Pulsar is not very big, it is just a tiny 
add-on that provides a lot of FUNctionality for
the more casual board-game enthusiast.