RE: GTK Port and XBoard contribution

[Simon Scatton]

Hello everyone,

 

Happy new year to you all!

 

During the holidays I’ve look at the codebase and researched a lot about GNU necessities in order to contribute.

just wanted to check in quickly. It seems that the next step would be to

get Simon set up for contributing, but also perhaps as maintainer.

I’ve already sent an email for the FSF to send me the copyright papers but they have not responded yet. Maybe it’s because it’s the actual maintainer that need to fill this request.

I hadn't had time to work on X-Board in a while, but can probably help

out a bit with a few questions in regards on how to do releases, etc.

I'm learning Autotools and all the toolchain that is needed in order to deploy the application, I also think that autotools might not be the best choice if we decide to merge both windows and linux version ? CMake seems more adapted to work on Windows application but since it's a GNU I'm unsure if that's possible. I think I'll find a way to compile autools project on windows. I've already seen some possibilities with MinGW. I was also thinking on using some Github pipelines for the releases etc. That will come later in the discussion though. 

The next step would probably be to contact GNU and ask them to add Simon

to the project.

That would be very nice !

Simon: did you have a chance to look more into this? In the past hgm was

also very active on winboard and xboard, but I'm not sure what the

current status is.

The Windows community is very active but I haven't had a chance to post on the forum yet. I'll do probably in the weekend of this week.

Futhermore I think that from what I've seen that XBoard maybe need a lot of rewriting in the code. The logic part has nothing to be redone to my knowledge (the parser etc). But with the GUI being ported I think I will need to refactor things a lot and probably delete a lot of code. I was also thinking that XBoard could become a really good analysis tools and in the end compete (on a free software level) with chess GUI such as Fritz or Arena in terms of capabilities and usability. Maybe incoporate some databases ? I'm just shooting ideas but that's what I was aiming to do. Please tell me what you feel about this :)

Simon