Re: [XBoard-devel] Polyglot 2.0,

[Michel Van den Bergh]

Hi,

I just noticed this thread. I am the current maintainer of Polyglot 1.4.**b
I would like to make some things clear for people who have not followed the
discussion.

Reading the comments one might think that my version of PG somehow
does not support the new WB extensions or that I am unwilling to make PG 
evolve.
In fact it supports  the extensions perfectly and I am still the only
one who has implemented them.

At stake here is a purely cosmetical (I would say superficial) issue.
For flexibility my version exports all options from the PG config file 
as "feature option=" commands.
The idea is that the GUI can set those options it is interested in 
internally and ignore
the others (this is explicitly written in the manual). The names of the
exported options are prefixed by "Polyglot " so they are easy to filter.

This idea of setting some PG options internally is basically how WB 
2.3.15 works except
that  WB 2.3.15 uses custom config files rather than option setting 
commands.

For some reason Harm Geert decided to include the "Polyglot" options
in the Engine settings dialog (although they are not engine options) but
then decided he was not happy with how the result looked.
Rather than adapting WB he decided that PG should adapt. This is the 
origin of the proposed fork.
It is ironic that if I had not provided the possibility of setting 
Polyglot options at runtime
this issue would never have arisen.

I would object to labeling the proposed fork 2.0.38b as it is basically 
a minor patch on an
interim version of mine labeled 1.4.38b. Also  PG 1.4.**b is currently 
accepted for
Debian so this would be another reason to give the proposed fork a 
different name.

Michel