Re: [XBoard-devel] save position dialog box

[H.G. Muller]

Chris Bannister schreef op 1/28/2015 om 7:30 PM:
> e.g. I start it in dir x/y/z, but when saving a position the dialog
> seems to assume I'm in x/y and I keep having to choose z *each* time I
> save a .fen file.
This is weird, as for me it definitely does NOT do that. That it does it 
each time is normal;
the file selector is called in a mode that does not change XBoard's 
current directory.
(If it did, this could have all kind of nasty effects on filenames that 
were given earlier
through a relative path.) But is should have opened in x/y/z all the 
time, not in x/y.

Perhaps it is due to a difference in GTK library.

> This is a second issue. Previously, I have been using a separate file
> for each position I save e.g. 6w-Bg5.fen. I have just tried using the
> supplied name and having the positions appended to it.
Well, if you would use separate files, you would have to type the name 
in any case.
so there doesn't seem any drawback in proposing a name. The proposed name
disappears as soon as you hit a key.
> The save/open dialog box doesn't seem to think so. e.g even choosing to
> open a .pgn I have to change into the child directory I started xboard
> from.
Did you use the version from http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi ? 
4.8.0 does
does not have this.
> Can this be put in the .xboardrc file? I'll try it out, could be a bit
> cumbersome typing it on the command line each time I start xboard.
Well, it is a volatile option, not saved in the settings file. So to 
change its default
value you would need some trickery. In particular you would have to 
rename ~/.xboardrc
to something else (say ~/xboard.ini), and then create a new file 
~/.xboardrc that contains

-settingsFile ~/.xboard.ini
-positionDir ~/whatever/i/like

This would redirect the reading and saving of settings to ~/.xboard.ini 
, so that ~/.xboardrc
is never overwritten anymore, and the -positionDir specification stays 
in place. This is the
general method to make values of volatile options stick, or turn 
persistent options into
volatile options with a configured default.

There is no similar option for pgn files, though. The only reason for 
creating this option
was to make it possible to specify some directory in XBoard's installed 
data from a
'theme definition' settings file for configuring XBoard for Shogi: this 
directory would
then contain all the commonly used handicap positions, so that Load 
Position could
be used to immediately select a handicap from the file-browse dialog. 
Dedicated
Shogi interfaces would have a special menu item for choosing the 
handicap, and this
seemed a nice general way to provide the same functionality in a 
configurable way.

> So it it could be with GTK, then.
This is what I suspect. But I don't know GTK that well. It could be that 
they changed
the default behavior of the file selector, although the behavior you 
mention seems
very strange to me. I cannot imagine who would ever want that. It cannot 
be that
there is something in the name of the final directory in the path that 
is somehow
offensive to GTK, making it ignore it?

Can you see files in the file-selector window once you arrive in a 
directory where
there are .fen files? If not, it is like XBoard has somehow launched a 
file selector for
folders rather than files.
>