Re: [XBoard-devel] Protocol development (old v3 draft)

[Tim Mann]

Thanks for looking that over and commenting on it.  All your comments
generally sound good to me except perhaps this one:

On Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:31:11 +0100, "h.g. muller" <address@hidden> wrote:
> RESTRICTIONS
> I think it is bad to require that some commands only are allowed in force 
> mode,
> or when the engine is not thinking or pondering. This would make engines
> supporting v3 not automatically support v2. I think we should drop that idea.

The reason for adding the restrictions was that (at that time anyway),
we had engine authors who were unhappy about having to support all
commands in all modes, and who found the protocol spec unclear about
what some of the commands would mean when not in force mode or if
issued while the engine was thinking or pondering.  In some cases it
wasn't clear even to me what those commands should do in other modes.

The restrictions were meant to clarify things that xboard already
does (or rather, that it already doesn't do), so adding them shouldn't
break the interaction between xboard and any engines.  However, in
theory it could break other GUIs that use the protocol if they happen
to send those commands when not in force mode.

Still, I'm not strongly in favor of adding the restrictions, and I
haven't looked at them for a long time and am not certain that all of
them are reasonable.

-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/