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Subject: Re: Draft of revised xboard/winboard engine protocol

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 12:02:40 12/09/00

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On December 09, 2000 at 06:11:44, Chessfun wrote:

>On December 08, 2000 at 14:17:47, Stefan Meyer-Kahlen wrote:
>
>>On December 08, 2000 at 14:06:15, Dieter Buerssner wrote:
>>
>>>On December 08, 2000 at 13:53:12, Stefan Meyer-Kahlen wrote:
>>>
>>>>This is not what I wanted to see happen after publishing our UCI engine <-> user
>>>>interface protocol. Winboard hasn?t moved for years and now that our protocol is
>>>>published for a week suddenly all the improvements we added in UCI are copied to
>>>>winboard. I published UCI to have ONE clear and easy engine protocol. Well, UCI
>>>>is free, but still I don?t really like that.
>>>
>>>Stefan, please not, that these changes were discussed in the chess engines
>>>mailing list, before you published UCI. For my part, I made some suggestions,
>>>(and some of those are part of the new draft Tim has shown), before I ever
>>>heard of UCI. I would assume, that others didn't know of UCI, when they
>>>thought about enhancements of the WB protocol. So the "suddenly one week
>>>after ..." seems to be an accident.
>>>
>>>Regards,
>>>Dieter
>>
>>
>>I didn't know that as I am not on the list.
>>I am sorry.
>>
>>   Stefan
>
>I thought I once read that Tim planned no further changes to Winboard due to
>time limitations and that others maybe would continue. I know there was talk
>about adapting it to also run tournaments.
>
>But it would seem to me from that alone Stefan has a reasonable point.
>
>Sarah.


I disagree mildly.  IE winboard/xboard are _free_ programs that almost all
the non-commercial authors are using for development, testing, and even playing
on chess servers.  Adopting a brand new protocol is not easy.  And then the
question is "how do we test?"  By then writing a GUI or interface that uses
that new protocol?  That is a lot of work, which is why most of us still use
winboard/xboard...  to avoid doing that.

Xboard has a few holes...  but overall it works flawlessly on the chess servers,
and as a GUI front-end for engines.  I don't see any reason to toss it out...
it has had major changes in the last year or two (animated piece movement,
drag/drop graphics, etc...) I would assume it will continue to be developed.



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