New XBoard alpha version. Please test!

[Michel]

This version of xboard still says
that polyglot "quit unexpectedly" even if I now send the appropriate tellusererror before that.
This is not very nice as people tend to blame polyglot for engine problems.

You said that after "tellusererror" xboard would suppress subsequent error dialog boxes.

[michiguel]

I could not install it
Miguel

Initially the package I uploaded to my website was truncated (without warning), because I exceeded my disk quota on the server.

Check if what you have is 717278 bytes. If not, you will have to download it again.

Yep! that was the problem.
The file selector is working for the xboard menus, but not in the the engine settings. I am assuming that is the intended behavior for now, but it would be great if it did!

Miguel
PS: It has a funny way to use the mouse, but that is ok once I realize I needed to press both buttons to slide the files.

[hgm]

This version of xboard still says
that polyglot "quit unexpectedly" even if I now send the appropriate tellusererror before that.
This is not very nice as people tend to blame polyglot for engine problems.

You said that after "tellusererror" xboard would suppress subsequent error dialog boxes.

That is still the plan, but I have not implemented it yet. Thank you for reminding me.

About the xboard.debug:

It turns out that due to wrong default option settings, the debug output went to winboard.debug, not xbard.debug. So you must have been looking at an old file. For me the debug output in winboard.debug looked quite normal.

[hgm]

I now posted a new version:

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/xboard ... 2_i386.deb

This should fix most problems reported so far:
* fonts are no longer saved in the settings file (and I removed them out of the master settings file), as what was saved at one board size would not be suitable for another board size.
* The default name for the debug file is now xboard.debug in stead of winboard.debug
* The FEN sent in setboard is normal, and -first(second)NeedsNoncompliantFEN now behaves as it should.

[hgm]

The file selector is working for the xboard menus, but not in the the engine settings. I am assuming that is the intended behavior for now, but it would be great if it did!

Miguel
PS: It has a funny way to use the mouse, but that is ok once I realize I needed to press both buttons to slide the files.

You mean you would want -file and -path options to have a browse button? This will have to wait until I redo the option settings dialog. I wanted to do that anyway: in WinBoard (where I implemented it later) I have an intermediate (platform-independent) level of formatting to design the layout of this dialog, and XBoard should make use of this too, rather than driving the low-level dialog creator directly with the option list given by the engine. Once I do that I will also add the browse buttons. (And in WinBoard I have to alter the low-level dialog creator to use real spin controls.)

Indeed I had a hard time understanding how to operate the scroll bars a well. This seems to be the standard way that sliders work in X, though. I noticed that the sliders in the history window and engine-output window also work like that. This explains why I thought up to now that they did not work at all, and always had to close and reopen the windows when I had accidentally touched them!

[Don]

I have a new alpha version of XBoard, and I hope some of you guys are willing to test it. There were several major changes, so it will really need extensive testing.

* I have taken the file selector from Ghostview and put it in XBoard
* The EvalGraph window is now iplemented
* It remembers its settings on a file. What the name of this file is, is configurable in a master settings file /etc/xboard/xboard.conf. The one that comes with the install uses ~/.xboardrc for this, (where settings would also be saved), but you can change that by editing it.
* Polyglot is invoked (with -fUCI / -sUCI) through the -adapterCommand line, without making temporary polyglot_1st.ini files. (So it only works with Polyglot 1.4.46b or newer).

At the moment it only available as a binary Debian package for i386 architecture at:
http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/xboard ... 1_i386.deb

This is a great improvement over older version of Xboard. Nice work.

One thing that I noticed is that "paste position" no longer works. That means if I have a fen position I cannot transfer it to a running instance without having to put the position in a file and then reloading the program.

This is a pretty serious issue in my opinion, at least for me because I use that feature all the time. Is that pretty fixable?

[hgm]

Something was changed by Tim in this area recently:

XBoard now pastes from the clipboard, not from the selection. There is an option -pasteSelection true|false that can restore the old behavior.

Can you check if the problem is related to that or can be solved that way? It might be that it works, but just doesn't do what you expect anymore.

[Don]

Something was changed by Tim in this area recently:

XBoard now pastes from the clipboard, not from the selection. There is an option -pasteSelection true|false that can restore the old behavior.

Can you check if the problem is related to that or can be solved that way? It might be that it works, but just doesn't do what you expect anymore.

Ok thanks, it works now when I do this.

Also, I can verify that the clock font is working now too.

[Michel]

That is still the plan, but I have not implemented it yet. Thank you for reminding me.

Ok. The current situation is really bad.

It is really a trivial thing to implement. The object representing the engine should get a new member "telluser_error_seen" which should be set after a tellusererror and reset after any other type of input.

When xboard encounters a fatal error it should suppress its usual fatal error dialog boxes when the flag telluser_error_seen is true for that engine.

I would still prefer it if there was some dedicated way for an engine to report a fatal error, but at least the above approach would make the user experience better.

[hgm]

Do you have a Polyglot with which I can test this? I tried 1.4.53b, but it did not send a user error at all when I ask it to run a non-existing engine. Just a not-found message, which is taken by XBoard as a fatal-error message.

I had planned to suppress only the broken-pipe errors when the last received message was a tellusererror.