Re: [Gnushogi-devel] gnushogi xboard support

[h . g . muller]

> Well, there's no Debian-specific standard on this that I know of, only
> the traditionnal "everything in one basket" ~/.whatever, and the
> freedesktop "basedir" spec suggesting
> ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:~/.config/whatever}

OK so for now I keep it as ~/.xboard-shogi-rc.
>
> It is indeed something that would have probably surprised me less than
> the current behaviour.  Requesting less flags from the user for a
> reasonable default is usually a good idea.
>
OK, I pushed a commit that realizes this. It will switch automatically to
the first variant supported by the engine, when it doesn't support Chess
or Chess960, and no other engines or ICS are involved. This is indeed very
convenient; I only have to type "xboard -fcp maxqi", and I can play
Xiangqi (in western representation).

So when GNU Shogi would play both regular and mini-Shogi, we could let it
print

feature variants="shogi,5x5+5_shogi,mini"

in response to "protover 2", and

setup (P.BR.S...G.+.++.+Kp.br.s...g.+.++.+k) 5x5+5_shogi
rbsgk/4p/5/P4/KGSBR w 0 1

in response to "variant mini".

When the user then types

xboard -fcp gnushogi

XBoard would automatically switch to shogi (with western display) and
'mini' would appear as an extra button in the New Variant dialog, and
would enable them to switch to mini-Shogi with a single mouse click,
without making use of any external configuration files. To play with
oriental display the should start as

xboard @shogi

which would invoke gnushogi by default, and apart from the display style
would bring them in the same state as before. There would not be any need
for any configuration by a separate @mini, if the engine does send the
"setup" command. Even if it would do it in response to "variant
5x5+5_shogi", which I put in the variants list for compatibility purposes.
(If "mini" is an engine-defined non-standard variant, other engines
playing the same might call it "minishogi", or "MiniShogi", and would not
recognize each other's name for it when you tried to play them against
each other.) To generate the 5x5+5_ the user would have to use the size
overrides in the New Variant dialog, or would need command-line arguments
(possibly packed as @mini) to set those. But if a dedicated gnuminishogi
would have "5x5+5_shogi" as first variant in its variants feature, then
XBoard would not only switch to shogi, but also override the board size to
5x5, so that it would indeed request 5x5+5_shogi from the engine (which
would then provide the initial position and piece set through "setup").
>
> Indeed, that's the problem the shell completion would address -
> assuming we're just talking about shell users here, since people launching
> xboard from a GUI would rather use .desktop or other menu entries.
>
I can't imagine well how that would work. Most users would not want
@shogi, @chu or @xq on the command line, as they would want to use XBoard
for normal Chess. And it seems hard for the shell to predict what the user
would want in terms of command-line arguments. Does it keep statistics on
what the user types?

H.G.