Re: [XBoard-devel] 4.4.1

[h.g. muller]

At 05:42 3-10-2009 +0200, Michel Van den Bergh wrote:
> Well periodic updates in on by default in
> xboard! It tells you
> during analysis which root move the engine is thinking about.
> This is very useful information and I cannot see why one would
> want to disable it.

I do not disable it. I just never use analysis mode. My engines do
not
even support it.

> It would be useful if this feature
were also available during normal 
> search but the xboard protocol does not allow for this 
> (in contrast to the UCI protocol).

Well, I don't know. I looked in the protocol specs what it is
supposed
to do, and it seems to me that this is just info the engine should
volunteer as part of its Thinking Output. Probing the engine for it
seems a fundamentally wrong way to go about it.

> Well it definitely still exists in xboard
> 4.4.0beta. Has it been disabled
> since then?

I was basing this on the code snipppet

VOID
AnalysisPopUp(char* title, char* str)
{
  FARPROC lpProc;
  char *p, *q;

  /* [AS] */
  EngineOutputPopUp();
  return;

after which there follows a lot of unreachable code which defined
the old
analysis window. But I see now that this code is in winboard.c, and
that
the corresponding code in xboard.c is not patched. This might very
well
be the cause of any problems you experience.

Could you try if putting these last two lines in AnalysisPopUp of
xboard.c
solves the problem?

> I often prefer the analysis window since it
> takes very little screen space.
> If you just want the PV then you are not interested in all the
> information
> provided by the engine output window.

Then you probbly won't be happy with this change. What information do
you
conider redundant in the Engine-Output? You say "just PV", but
I suppose
you would like to see the score and depth too. Is it just the time and
node 
count that bothers you? The Engine Output window is scalable, and can
be
made so small that it only displays one line of Thinking output.