Re: [XBoard-devel] Connecting to ICS through gateway broken?

[Michel Van den Bergh]

On 06/13/2011 10:28 AM, address@hidden wrote:
> > Interestingly, the current command line parsing rejects "" for some
> > reason:
> >
> >
> > $ xboard -gateway localhost -ics -icshost freechess.org -remoteUser ""
> > xboard: No value provided for argument -remoteUser
> >
> >
> > That's a bug too -- "" is an empty string; it's not "no value".
> This is not something we can help. It is the shell that does this. Empty
> strings in the settings file work perfectly. So the internal parser seems
> OK.
Are you sure? I would think that if you have an argument ""
then the shell would pass the empty string as the corresponding argument
to main.

Michel



> I agree this is very annoying. Just like it is annoying in WinBoard that
> newer Windows versions do not display shortcut 'target' lines beyond the
> first @-sign. So when I distribute shortcuts in the binary install that
> have "winboard.exe @xq.ini" because they need so many arguments (line a
> new list of /firstChessProgramNames for Xiangqi engines) that they wuld
> exceed the maximum allowed command-line length, so that I have to pass
> them in an indirection file, people that open the shortcut just see
> "winboard.exe", and have no idea why it does what it does. (And worse,
> when they then close the "properties" dialog with "OK" in stead of
> "cancel", they actually break it.)
>
> I am not sure what to do about this. Complaining to MicroSoft that the @
> sign in shortcuts did not display, evoked the brilliant response that we
> could use a character other than '@'...
>
> So it seems that if we want to fix those issues, we should indeed define a
> synonym for '@' as indirection symbol (or perhaps make it configurable for
> backward compatibility, by adding a comand-line option -atSign "#" that we
> could use in the master-settings file to define the alternative.
>
> And for the Linux empty-string problem, we could (say) define _EMPTY_ as a
> keyword representing an empty string, so it could be passed on the command
> line.