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

Author: Chessfun

Date: 21:04:41 12/09/00

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On December 09, 2000 at 15:02:40, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>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.

Don't get me wrong. Winboard is truly a great program, but I just thought Tim
was no longer going to upgrade it.

Sarah.




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