Re: Options and the manual

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 10:48 AM, h.g. muller <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> I am not sure why all the option starting with a hyphen exist next to
> those starting with x,
> e.g. -xcoords and --xcoords as opposites of -coords. Those starting with
> hyphen are neither
> documented for XBoard or WinBoard. Can't we simply drop them all?
>

> Perhaps Tim can shed some light on this.
>

Sure, let's get rid of those. I don't remember why I had both "-" and "x"
prefixes to turn off boolean options. The "-" prefix seems like a bad idea.

  { "internetChessServerComPort", ArgString, (void *) &appData.icsCommPort,
> FALSE, INVALID },
>  { "icscom", ArgString, (void *) &appData.icsCommPort, FALSE, INVALID },
>

I don't know what these do; might also be WB only.


Probably WB only. You could try to talk to the ICS through a serial port
that way. I don't remember why one would ever want to do that. I don't
think anyone would miss the feature if it were deleted.


> These options are potentially damaging, as they specify features to be
> used as if
> the engine had sent them, which normally would thoroughly wreck operation.
> I think I added the on request as a kludge to run Windows engines under
> wine,
> as a wine bug causes a SIG_INT to kill such binaries even when they ignore
> SIG_INT,
> so that you have to fool XBoard into thinking the engine sent 'feature
> sigint=0' to
> make it work. I could have made explicit options for that (e.g.
> -firstNoSigInt etc.),
> but it seemed more versatile (but also potentially more damaging) to allow
> -firstFeatures "sigint=0". I am a bit hesitant to document such hacks.


The sigint thing is a bit of a botch. It is on by default because it was
part of the protocol version 1 standard, but I believe only certain
versions of GNU Chess ever needed it. For all other engines it's just a
problem to be worked around.