[XBoard-devel] Latest and future developments

[h.g. muller]

Perhaps this is a good time to make a summary of recent and expected 
developments.

*) A quite nasty bug has surfaced in the XBoard file browser: it turned out 
the browser
counted on . and .. being the first two entries in any directory, and 
skipped them blindly.
On my Ubuntu 8.04 this aparently was true, as I never noticed any 
weirdness. But people
were complaining about missing files, and now I have Ubuntu 10.04 I see 
this too.
If another file is the first entry, it was ignored, and . was appearing in 
the list instead.
This was easy to fix, of course, but perhaps important enough to prompt a 
new release (4.5.3)?

*) Another bug for the major league was that the error exit to the Engine 
#N Settings dialog
when the engine has no options (e.g. Crafty or GNU Chess), which at one 
time was needed
to prevent a crash (that bug has been fixed now, but printing "Engine has 
no options" still
seems a more useful response than showing a window with only an OK and 
Cancel button),
did not reset the flag indicating the generic popup was used for engine 
options, so that
after that almost none of the XBoard dialogs would work anymore (all 
producing the
"Engine has no options"error popup instead.

*) I have been experimenting a bit with something XBoard untill now never 
supported at all:
the possibility to search for a given position in a PGN file. It seems I 
have something that
works reasonably well now, using an internal memory cache to store games in 
a search-friendly
format, and implementing the most important search modes (such as for an 
exact position,
for a certain material composition, or one within a given range, etc.) This 
does put XBoard
on the map in the world of Chess database applications. It might not be as 
good as Chessbase
or SCID, but it is an acceptable alternative. The version that does this is 
in the 'profile' branch
of the hgm.nubati.net repository. I used the Load Options dialog for 
specifying the search
parameters (because it was still an almost empty dialog), although perhaps 
the Game-List Options
dialog would have been a more logical place (but not done by the generic 
popup). A good question
is how far we want XBoard to go along this road. Should it remain a nice 
feature occasionally used
for searching a position in a moderate size file, or do we really want to 
cater to heavy-duty
database users who want to scan through millions of games (and could only 
do that efficiently
if you can load and store the compact internal formats, rather than the 
clumsy PGN.)

*) As the database capability invites the use of bigger PGN files, a quite 
severe limitation
of Xaw listboxes surfaced: it turned out XBoard did not want to display 
more than some 1900
games in the Game List (of the 41,000 that were in my test file). I suspect 
this also has to
do with the average line length (perhaps a 64K character limit?) This also 
seems a pretty
severe bug to me. I produced a work-around, where you can 'page' through 
the Game List,
which I limited to displaying 1000 games. This patch is in the database 
branch, though.
I am not sure if we want to generally fix it (i.e.also in 4.5.x); no one 
ever complained about this.
I suppose the GTK version will not have this limitation (I know WinBoard 
hasn't, so the back-end
must be OK), so perhaps we just leave it for there.

*) There was a request for the tournament-manager function to allow 
replacement of
particpants during the tourney. (It seems almost no GUI can do this.) This 
was easy to
implement, and seems to work fine. (Two new buttons in the tournament dialog.)

*) Another request was to allow null-move (turn passing) in analysis; I 
implemented this by
clicking the clock of the side you want to give the move to. Other major 
GUIs support null-move too.

*) A cosmetic improvement was to allow a separate font in WinBoard for the 
Game List
on one hand, and Move History / Engine Output on the other. This was 
requested by users
that wanted to use a figurine font in the latter two, without this messing 
up the Game List.
We might consider how we want to handle fonts in XBoard, where there are 
now only three
clock, coord and message, the latter used for almost everything. Some 
diversification here
will not be over-doing it. (WinBoard has 8 different fonts after this 
change...)