Re: Direct commands

I put them there as a hack to use when experimenting with engines that
accept extra nonstandard commands, and initially they were deliberately
undocumented. You definitely can remove them.

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 3:30 AM, h.g. muller <[email protected]> wrote:

> Unfortunately one of my patches broke something.
> I overlooked that Arun had also assigned the direct engine commands
> to Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2, so when I re-assiged Ctrl+. to <Enter> I commented
> out Aruns changes to read out the Ctrl key, because I thought all
> 'non-existing'
> Ctrl combination had been gone, and I wated to avoid unnecessary X-server
> calls.
>
> These lines should be uncommented again.
>
> That is, if we really want to keep those commands. WinBoard does not have
> them,
> and IMO allowing the user to send an arbitrary string to the engine serves
> little
> other purpose than giving him unlimited power to wreck things. It is
> something
> you would do as a hack at a time where the protocol is very incomplete and
> poorly defined, so that many engines support lots of features not
> supported by
> the protocol, all in a different way. But the current protocol is well
> developed,
> and should allow an engine author to implement any feature he wants using
> standard protocol (through option features) with nice support in GUI
> dialogs.
> So there is no need for these direct commands, and their existence could
> encourage engine authors to make their engines depend on them, rather
> than using standard protocol.
>
> So I propose to remove the key bindings, or even to drop them altogether.
> In that case the Ctrl-key lines can remain commented.
>
>