Re: [XBoard-devel] theme packages

[Tim Mann]

It seems a bit odd to have xboard run arbitrary commands using system(). Why not just have an option that prints the data directory and exits? Then you could accomplish the same thing with

cp *.svg `xboard --showDataDir`/themes/xiangqi
cp xq.xop `xboard --showDataDir`/themes/conf
cp xqboard.png `xboard --showDataDir`/themes/textures"

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 10:20 AM, <address@hidden> wrote:

> Will this be in the next dev release?

Yes, it will; I will probably push it to Savannah tonight. In the dev
release that just took place there were already options introduced that
would allow automatic addition of newly installed engines to the all the
user's private lists of installed engines:

-addMasterOption "TEXT LINE"

would add a line and a -date stamp to XBoard's master settings file
(/etc/xboard.conf). It could be used to add an (also new) option

-installEngine "fruit -fUCI"

to the master file, which would (when a user would start XBoard) add Fruit
to his installed engines (-firstChessProgramNames), provided that the date
stamp in the master settings file was more recent than the save date in
his private settings file (so that he apparently sees this new engine for
the first time). Engine packages (e.g. fruit) could then through their
install scripts cause automatic update of each user's engine list, by
including the command

xboard -addMasterOption {-installEngine "fruit -fUCI"} -autoClose

I guess I should still make such 'automatic update' of the engine list
subject to an option, so that users that don't want it can switch it off.
Best would be if they could switch it off selectively, so that they only
get engines for variants that interest them. E.g. with the persistent
option

-engineUpdates "normal,fischerandom"

only -installEngine options should be executed that contain "-variant
fischerandom" in the line they specify, or do not contain "-variant" as a
sub-string at all (to account for the special case "normal", which is the
default). That would protect them from Shogi or Xiangi engines being
appended to their engine list when someone else on the same machine
installs them, without the need to also block Chess engines. The value
"all" would cause unconditional execution of any -addEngine option.

Of course the main difficulty would be to get engine-package maintainers
to actually include such xboard commands in their install script. But at
least I could do it for my own engines.