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h.g. muller | 3 Jun 2009 19:59
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WinBoard installer

I think it is time to have an open discussion on the WinBoard installer,
and the connected question what we actually want to supply in the install
package. Jaap Weidmann, wo offered to do the installer, just let me know
that he thinks it would be no problem to make a flexible install, where people
can check their 'user profile', and depending on it get one set of components
or the other. So the strategy I wanted to propose is that we define a maximum
install, containing everything we can and should supply for whatever purpose,
and then decide which subsets of it would be useful for which type of users.

Possible user profiles I could think of are:
- ICS user: uses XBoard for playing on-line against other humans
- Analyzer: wants to analyze his own games or PGN games with the best 
possible engine
- Fun player: wants to play against a computer opponent he has a chance of 
beating
- Chess-variant player: similar, but interested in many different variants
- Xiangqi player: similar, but mainly intersted in Chinese Chess
- Engine collector: wants to play many different engines
- Engine tester: wants to play enine-engine tournaments.
- Bot master: wants to play engines on an ICS
- Customizer: cares for a fancy display

For the 'maximum install' I had something in mind like the WinBoard Gold Pack,
augmented with more variant adapters and more (variant) engines. We obviously
have to think in how far we want to or can go supplying engines. Not all 
engines
have compatible licenses, and not all engines are interesting. I think the 
policy
here should be to support a minimal set that covers most needs.
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h.g. muller | 4 Jun 2009 21:09
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www.tim-mann.org

A sensitive question:

What is the future of the xboard pages on www.tim-mann.org?

I get the impression that Tim would like to bail out of the project.
So will the www.tim-mann.org website be upgraded to xboard 4.4.0
once we release it? Will it disappear and would we have to look
for other hosting opportunities?

One reason to ask the question now is that the tim-mann.org domain
occurs very frequently in most doc files. Should we start working on
slowly editing out the references to this URL?

H.G.
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Tim Mann | 5 Jun 2009 04:46

www.tim-mann.org

Not sensitive for me, and I'm glad you brought it up.

I don't need to bail out completely, though I'll probably continue to
do very little.

I'm willing to host web pages in my domain indefinitely, but for many
reasons it would be a good idea to move the primary web pages for
xboard to a URL that doesn't have my name in it.  The GNU project has
web space for us at http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard that we
currently are not using, so that seems like a reasonable place to put
the project's pages.  Stallman sent Arun and me an email for GNU
maintainers recently that includes instructions for how to put pages
there.  I don't think the project needs its own domain name; does
anyone else?

The chess pages that I have now on tim-mann.org are sadly out of date
in many ways, so just copying them over isn't enough.  I don't think
the project even should start by copying them over, as the current pages
have the flavor of being part of my personal web site, not pages for a
multi-person project where others are doing 99+% of the work.  Maybe
there is still some useful stuff there that could be reused, though.

Here's a suggestion: gradually change the documentation to point to
http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard, after putting a small placeholder
page there.  The placeholder should have some basic info and a links to
places to go for more info, such as
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/xboard/, the WinBoard Forum, and
probably my old pages.  Then when/if someone has the time and
motivation, they can replace the placeholder page with a more extensive
web site.
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Arun Persaud | 5 Jun 2009 05:39
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www.tim-mann.org

Hi

> How does this sound?
> 
> 	--Tim

sounds good ;) I can probably put up a simple webpage at the weekend and after that perhaps someone with a bit
better design skill can send in some nicer ones ;)

ARUN
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h.g. muller | 5 Jun 2009 09:19
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www.tim-mann.org

At 19:46 4-6-2009 -0700, Tim Mann wrote:
>...
>Here's a suggestion: gradually change the documentation to point to
>http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard, after putting a small placeholder
>page there.  The placeholder should have some basic info and a links to
>places to go for more info, such as
>http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/xboard/, the WinBoard Forum, and
>probably my old pages.  Then when/if someone has the time and
>motivation, they can replace the placeholder page with a more extensive
>web site.

I like the idea of the place holder. It provides an immediate solution,
from which we could then gradually expand.

Perhaps the place holder should go both on the gnu/software site,
as well as physically replacing www.tim-mann.org/xboard.html ,
so that all existing links on the internet (including the prime link
Google gives to people who search for "xboard") will automatically
be made to bring people to this "XBoard portal". There they then get
offered a choice to go to the old (or updated) tim-mann.org/xboard.html,
gnu.org/software, the WB forum, the WBEC or RWBC sites (for engines),
and whatever other download mirrors we would want to set up. The
"manual.html" page we now have in the tree would also be a useful
page on the gnu.org/software site.

Note that the way we used to distribute XBoard for Linux is becoming a
bit outdated; Linux users nowaday expect to rely on the packaging system
to download software and solve dependencies, by typing "apt-get install".
A Debian package for XBoard would probably not contain the WinBoard stuff.
So we should continue to host sources for WinBoard anyway, and Linux
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Arun Persaud | 5 Jun 2009 19:21
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www.tim-mann.org

Hi

> [web pages]

yes, I think that would be a clean solution. We first put up a small
page for xboard with a download, links and documentation section and if
Tim can move his pages to another name (to which we will then link) and
have www.tim-mann.org/xboard.html issuing a 301 (permantenly moved) to
http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard the whole move should go without
anyone running into "file not found" errors.

> Note that the way we used to distribute XBoard for Linux is becoming a
> bit outdated; Linux users nowaday expect to rely on the packaging system
> to download software and solve dependencies, by typing "apt-get install".
> A Debian package for XBoard would probably not contain the WinBoard stuff.
> So we should continue to host sources for WinBoard anyway, and Linux
> users should be able to build and install an XBoard from source with it.

I'm planing on generating rpms and debian packages (already have rpms
for openSUSE). Both can be created on the openSUSE build-server, which
makes updating them quite easy. We can then offer those packages from
the new webpage for openSUSE it's easy to offer "one-click" installs
from the webpage.

> I don't really have a WinBoard section on my own website, just a page with
> some screenshots (mostly of variants). We probably should combine that with
> Alessandro's page on Winboard_x, and the "manual.html" in the source tree,
> to quickly get a site advertizing the new features of this XBoard (since
> 4.2.7).
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Arun Persaud | 6 Jun 2009 01:07
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Re: WinBoard installer

Hi

> [windows installer]

how would the installer work, would you select some options and then the
installer would download those files online and install them or would we
provide separate installers for each option? In any case, how do we need
to supply those files, can we have them on a ftp-server or would a
web-server work too?

Also how much work will it be to create and maintain those installers.

Guess these are more technical issues, but some of them might influence
how much fine-tuning we want to allow. As far as providing small files
or larger ones: is that still an issue nowadays with hard drives being
quite big... I'm not sure if we need to worry about the size of files
too much.

ARUN
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Tim Mann | 6 Jun 2009 06:51

Re: WinBoard installer

I've been too out of touch to have detailed comments on H.G.'s message;
I'm not familiar with most of the programs he mentions.

I would just like to put in a plug for keeping things simple and fairly
small by default.  I think the "simple" install should include one
decent engine, timestamp, and timeseal (and little or nothing else),
and the download should include only those things.  Disks are big but
some people still have slow internet connections.  Also, I think people
who just want to do simple things (not engine collectors) are in the
vast majority, so we should make things easy for them.

But it's still great to also have a "gold pack" with everything you
need to get started doing more complicated things.  I think that could
either be a separate installer package, or (if the person working on
the installer wants to do it), it would be cool to have one installer
that has an options screen that lets you check more things to
download.  Even that should be simple in the sense that there should be
an easy way to say "give me a deluxe install" and get more or less
everything.  (I say "more or less" because maybe the installer might
eventually know about a large number of engines, and hardly anyone
would want to download them all at once.)

Just some thoughts.

	--Tim

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:07:52 -0700, Arun Persaud <apersaud <at> lbl.gov> wrote:
> Hi
> 
> > [windows installer]
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Tim Mann | 6 Jun 2009 06:59

www.tim-mann.org

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:19:42 +0200, "h.g. muller" <h.g.muller <at> hccnet.nl> wrote:
> Note that the way we used to distribute XBoard for Linux is becoming a
> bit outdated; Linux users nowaday expect to rely on the packaging system
> to download software and solve dependencies, by typing "apt-get install".
> A Debian package for XBoard would probably not contain the WinBoard stuff.
> So we should continue to host sources for WinBoard anyway, and Linux
> users should be able to build and install an XBoard from source with it.

The way we distribute xboard now isn't exactly outdated; it's just that
very few Linux end users get xboard directly from us.  Instead, the
distro vendors grab our .tar.gz release and repackage it for their
distros, and most users get it from the next release of the distro they
use.  Distro vendors don't usually pull stuff from CVS or git
repositories directly because they prefer something that the project
maintainers have tested enough to consider as a "release", so IMO we
should still do releases with version numbers and make .tar.gz files of
them available.

So we don't really have to change anything about how we release
xboard.  It's fine for us to build our own Debian packages and RPMs if
we want, and that may make it easier for some users to upgrade sooner
than their distros pick up our next release, but I don't think many
will do that.

--

-- 
Tim Mann  tim <at> tim-mann.org  http://tim-mann.org/
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h.g. muller | 6 Jun 2009 09:56
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Re: WinBoard installer

At 21:51 5-6-2009 -0700, Tim Mann wrote:
>I've been too out of touch to have detailed comments on H.G.'s message;
>I'm not familiar with most of the programs he mentions.
>
>I would just like to put in a plug for keeping things simple and fairly
>small by default.  I think the "simple" install should include one
>decent engine, timestamp, and timeseal (and little or nothing else),
>and the download should include only those things.

In principle I agree that the basic install should be as small as possible.
but in adition to what is mentioned above I would include Polyglot
(which is an adapter to run UCI engines under WinBoard). This new
WinBoard has options to automatically invoke Polyglot; the only thing the
user has to do for running a UCI engine is to tell WB the engine is UCI through
the -fUCI or -sUCI command-line options. The user thus never has to be
aware that Polyglot even exists, and I think it would be a strategic mistake
to necessitate him being aware of it during the install. Practice has taught
us that the average Windows user will not know what to do if he gets the
error message "Fatal error; polyglot.exe not found" when he tried to run
a UCI engine.

Polyglot.exe measures only 28 KB...

>Disks are big but
>some people still have slow internet connections.  Also, I think people
>who just want to do simple things (not engine collectors) are in the
>vast majority, so we should make things easy for them.

True, but I expect there is a large group of users that will want to analyze
games with the strongest engines they can lay their hand on, which means
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