Re: [XBoard-devel] forgot to mention

[h.g. muller]

At 13:39 27-2-2012 -0800, Arun Persaud wrote:
> will this also work on OS X and other UNIX variations or do we need to
> have this in an #ifdef and check for xdg-* during configure (which we
> are doing already anyway)?

I have no idea. If it is configuration dependent the logical way to handle it
would be to define a macro for the needed command, and let ./configure
figure out what the command should be to open the default browser,
and pass it with -D to the compiler. We could ask ourselves the same thing
for the man and info menu items: these issue a command "xterm", so what
if the user has no xterm on his system? (And now I remember that indeed
Debian complained about this, and patches it to become xterm-emulator...)

The docs I found said that xdg-open in fact is an alias for gnome-open, 
kde-open,
etc., and that these seem to be utilities originating from freedesktop.org 
which
determine mime type of thir argument, decide what application would be the
preferred one to handle it, and then launch that appliation with the given 
argument.
So it i in fact mor general than we want, as we already now we want to launch
a browser or a mailer. And apparently URLs are also considered to have a mime
type.

> I think you can do things like
>
> mailto:address@hidden&body=Bug%20report
>
> This way we could add information about the version, operating system,
> etc in the email and ask the user to add a description too... you just
> need to escape space and linebreaks, etc. correctly.

OK. This seems pretty much platform independent, so I can experiment a bit
with mailto: URLs on Windows, where I do have an e-mail client, (just putting
the URL in a local html page), to see if I can design something useful.

> I guess so, in the long term it would be good if the user guide would be
> written in texi and then we create html and pdfs from it. It could also
> just be the first chapter in our current texi documentation and then we
> could crosslink to the more detailed sections in the existing
> documentation which would be nice... texi can include pictures, etc, so
> that should be no problem and we could put it in an ifdef, so that the
> picture (or perhaps the whole chapter) doesn't show up in the info file.
> Perhaps something for 4.6.1...

OK. Docs are currently in a sorry state, so this would be a good time to
thoroughly reorganize them.

> yep, that page could be made to look nicer or we just use the home page
> and have a better "what's new" section in there with a link to a more
> detailed version.

Well, I posted a poll on TalkChess to get some feedback of what people
thought of our home page ( 
http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=42466 ).
The results have a huge spread, and when people comment on it, they praise
the information in it, but usually think the presentation sucks. So I wanted
to have a try at re-organizing it a bit, but I did not finish that.

> ok... just push it to master and v4.6.x and let me know when it's ready
> and I can package and release it.

OK, I will let you know.

> hmm, we could leave it out or label it experimental and enable it during
> configure.

So far it seems to work OK on OS X, which in itself is probably good enough
reason to leave the feature in. But I will add a "-stickyWindows false" in the
xboard.conf.in, and a warning on the What's New page that it might not work
on systems with a broken window manager.

Regards,
H.G.