Include Crafty with Winboard package?

[rjgibert]

Why do you say "pathetic?" I voted "No," but I would think that even if only as little as 20% want it included, that result would be a compelling reason to include it. After all, with 20%, that's an awful lot of people to be ignoring.

This shouldn't be considered a majority rules issue. With as many as there actually are, it would be silly not to include it irrespective of the issues you may have for not doing so. You will obviously be making a lot of users happy by including it. That's a good thing isn't it? The ones that don't want it, don't have to use crafty. That doesn't seem like a terrible burden for them to bear at all.

[hgm]

Even if the vote was 90%, I would not do it. What people want is one thing, what I am going to do quite another. I am sure most people would vote for having to pay less taxes, but I am not going to pay their taxes for them! Of course people like engines to be distributed. (I am sure you could hold a Poll like this for a handfull of other popular engines.) But I am not going to distribute them, other than through the mechanism described above. I see it as my calling to provide people with tools to do a job. Not do the job for them...

So no engines will be distributed with WinBoard by me. Of course that doesn't have to stop anyone else. As I remarked in the other thread, WB is free software, and anyone is allowed to bundle and host it as they please!

The only reason some engines are included in the WinBoard package now is to serve as an example of how things can be done, and to prevent as much as possible things not working out of the box, but producing an error message in stead. Crafty is a pretty poor example of how things should be done, as it is only so-so WB compatible. I even have second thoughts about including Stockfish: unlike the GPL version of Fruit, Stockfish is being actively developed. So after a few month people would start complaining that an old version is included, and they would expect me to start watching the development of Stockfish or Crafty, and update the WinBoard package for every new release of one of the engines in it. People voting here of course do not realize that even when Crafty would have been distributed with WinBoard, it would now be Crafty 19.3 that was in the WB bundle, not 23.2. So they would still be unhappy...

Not giving people the engine they most badly want is actually a very good idea: it provides the maximum incentive for them to master the installation process. And the examples provided in the bundle now should not make that an unsurmountable problem for them.

[Guenther]

Why do you say "pathetic?" I voted "No," but I would think that even if only as little as 20% want it included, that result would be a compelling reason to include it. After all, with 20%, that's an awful lot of people to be ignoring.

This shouldn't be considered a majority rules issue. With as many as there actually are, it would be silly not to include it irrespective of the issues you may have for not doing so. You will obviously be making a lot of users happy by including it. That's a good thing isn't it? The ones that don't want it, don't have to use crafty. That doesn't seem like a terrible burden for them to bear at all.

This whole poll thing leads to nothing. If some vote for 'this' the next poll
starts for 'that' instead. IMO polls are much too often abused for trollish aims here.