Re: [XBoard-devel] Polyglot 2.0,

[h.g. muller]

At 01:52 1-9-2009 +0900, you wrote:

> > The crucial patch I put in made to 1.4.38b to create
> > "Polyglot 2.0.38b" is the one that allows it to save the current settings
> > back to the polyglot.ini file.
>
> I told you I was working on saving but was busy at the time and that it 
> would take
> a couple of weeks. You told me there was no hurry.

Well, the release would still take a couple of weeks, but I needed something to
test. And there was no hurry because I could easily make that myself. And I 
am glad
I did, because it did revel a bug in the engine-settings dialog, that was 
only triggered
by an option of the -save type.

> Meanwhile my version
> also does saving and I think in  a better way than yours.

Hmm, this remains to be seen. I probably don't see all ramifications yet, but
at first glance having two separate option files, one for reading and one 
for saving,
seems to add a lot of complexity users might not want. Having a "save 
settings now"
button is conceptually trivial.

> Ever since the X version WB has always contained PG specific code, by 
> reason of the fact that
> PG is necessary for the great majority of the engines that are used with
> WB. So it is not just some ordinary adapter.  How about creating the 
> polyglot_1st.in and polyglot_2nd.ini
> files. Is that not PG specific code? Even using polyglot to run UCI 
> engines is polyglot
> specific code.

Well I'd like to get rid of that, rather than expand it. Winboard_x did 
introduce a menu item to set the
"Polyglot directory", but in future versions I might actually replace that 
by an "adapter program"
input field that would be set to "polyglot.exe", rather than appending 
polyglot.exe as a fixed name to
the given path. Or even allow an "adapter command" with some 
meta-characters in it that would
be substituted by WinBoard by engine name, engine folder and ini-file. That 
seems a much
better design than the ini-file kludge (which you rightfully criticised). 
And then it could also
be used for running UCCI2WB, to run UCCI engines.

> I takes only one or two lines of code to filter out all the Polyglot 
> options giving a functionality
> equivalent to WB 4.3.15.  As said I was not forced to export the Polyglot
> options. It actually took a fair amount of  rewriting to do it in a nice 
> way. It seems
> I should not have bothered.

Not at all. I am gratefully using your code for this. I just put the two 
lines of code
to filter out what I don't want in Polyglot, rather than in WinBoard, 
because that is
where I think it belongs. (Note that I don't want to filter out all 
Polyglot options;
some are very useful. So it takes a bit more than 2 lines.)

> You want a veto over the options that PG exports. Whenever somebody
> has an idea for an option that might be useful he has submit it to you
> for approval whether it can be exported or not.  I wish you good luck
> finding people that want to cooperate under such conditions.

Well, that works both ways. I could say that you want to dictate what
Polyglot exports. I proposed to discuss it, and actually posted an in-depth
analysis of every option that was currently present, why I would like to
have them or not. You flatly refused to participate in that, and was even 
unwilling
to remove an option (Chess960) the presence of which was an obvious bug.
In fact, you don't even tolerate that I point out such bugs: "If I continue 
to criticise
Polyglot, I should make the modifications myself". Well, since I have not seen
you retract that, I did just that. So I don't understand why you are 
objecting now...

> Anyway you set your mind to forking PG but you cannot call it 2.0.38b. That
> would be completely dishonest. When people fork they do not grab a random 
> version slap
> a patch onto it and bump the version number. I have never heard of such a 
> thing. Call
> it 1.4.38hgm since that is what it is.

Well, there is a first time for everything. We discussed this once before, 
when I
proposed you should call your version 1.5 to indicate a discontinuous increase
in its capabilities, but it became quite clear that everyone working on 
Polyglot
now is married to the numer 1.4, and will continue to use it with a increasing
number of decimals. Not so long ago your version was called 1.4w10UCIb22,
or something like that. So I generously left 1.5 to 1.9 for others, not to get
in your way.

I would have expected the set of rational numbers to be large enough for 
the both
of us. I can't see anything dishonest in a number. It would IMO be more 
dishonest
if I climed this version somehow as mine by tagging my initials to it. The 
number
is not a big deal, btw; where it not for the fact that I added the 
"polyglot version"
dummy option, which acted only as a filler for space in the dialog that would
otherwise stay empty, it would not have shown up anywhere at all.

But if it makes you happy, I can call it 1.4.38x, to indicate it contains 
the "x-patch"
which optimizes it to work with XBoard.