Re: RE[2]: GTK Port and XBoard contribution

[Tim Mann]

Sorry I've been pretty much ignoring everything related to xboard.  I just looked back at this thread as I'm in the middle of enabling Simon as a project administrator on Savannah.

H.G., do you still not have the password to push things to Savannah? Maybe we can force a password reset for you.

Tangentially, I've started playing some chess again! I got interested in IM Eric Rosen's videos on YouTube and have been playing some on lichess.org. It has a really nice UI and features. It's quite an advance over where things were when I last played a real game online -- 20 years or so ago on chessclub.com or freechess.org.

On Wed, Jan 6, 2021 at 8:19 AM <h.g.muller@hccnet.nl> wrote:

Sorry for the late response; I did not have much time to spend on computer chess during the holidays.

Just for the record: I have not been doing much development on XBoard these past years, but I did some. Problem is that I had not done it for so long that I forgot the password I needed to push things to Savannah. So the most recent source code is only in my own on-line repository, at http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi (v4.9.x branch).

We should also have a version of XBoard upgraded to GTK 3, in some other branch. It was never merged into the master branch, though. I am also not sure if that version would be compilable on the VM I always use for XBoard development (which runs Ubuntu 10.04).

Note that WinBoard has its own build system, independent of the auto-tools. Since Windows is not really variable, things like ./configure really have no point there, and a makefile.gcc is included in the project to build WinBoard on Cygwin. This should probably be changed, as modern C compilers on Cygwin cannot do MinGW compiles anymore. But auto-tools is certainly not the way; a new makefile for MSYS or a MinGW script would be best.

Regards,

H.G.

Op zo., dec. 27, 2020 om 23:07, Simon Scatton <simon.scatton@outlook.fr> schreef:

Hello,

Thank you for responding to my previous message.

I think at the moment there is nothing going on in regards to
development (last commit is almost 2 years ago). If you want to
contribute code I would say go for it ;)

That’s cool ! I think I will try to get my head into the codebase since I think it’s a good way to start learning on GNU projects.

It would be great to see updates to newer GTK versions and better
integration across platforms or features you want to add.

I’m planning on using the latests versions of GTK. GTK4 was released about 2 weeks ago and it is really a nice piece of work. Merging both Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux projects would be really nice.

There is currently also no project admin that could do a release, etc.
So that would be another job that is open. I can probably help a tiny
bit with this, but I don't really have time to work on xboard anymore.

I can see myself trying to learn how to manage such project, and even maintain the XBoard project if you can give me some guidelines on how to do that, we maybe I could do this ?

As far as contributing goes, there is some paperwork that needs to be
filled out with GNU projects in regards to code-contributions. Would
have to look up how that works again.

I have no idea on what paperwork needs to be filled. I’ll look this up.

Happy holidays! :)

Happy Holidays to you too!

I’ve also seen that the Winboard community is quite active, I’ll ask around on the forum to see if anyone is interested in “revamping” XBoard.

Thank you for your response and your time.

Cheers

Simon Scatton

PS: Sorry for the blank email I sent you, it seems my inbox has gone crazy or I simply just miss-clicked the email. Please ignore my previous email to your personal mailbox.