Re: Hi from a new member of the xboard team

Den 19-12-2011 19:23, [email protected] wrote:

Hi

> We always bring XBoard to a state where we can do a 'make' without getting
> any warnings. When Arun encounters issues on the build server that do not
> crop up when I compiled in my own Ubuntu 10.04, he reports them to me, and
> we fix them too.
>
> I develop on a 32-bit laptop, though, and XBoard was originally developed
> on x86, so it contained many issues with pointer-int conversions when
> compiled for 64-bit, and initially I created new issues of that type
> because I was not sufficiently 64-bit aware. (Originally I only worked on
> WinBoard, and virtually no WinBoard user compiles his own binary, so as
> long as it compiled on my 32-bit system and I released the resulting
> binary, there never were any complaints.)
>
> As to warnings that occur when you do more strict checking than the
> Makefile does, I can only say that some normally requested by -Wall where
> intentionally disabled, because I considered them counter-productive. I am
> not going to write error-prone and difficult to understand code just
> because to silence some stupid, pedantic compiler... Silencing them with a
> compiler option does the job quite effectively!

Well, the compiler only does what you tell it to do, and all kind of 
warnings can turned on and off individually (at least so with gcc which 
I use). I just wonder which warnings you consider to inflict error-prone 
and difficult to understand code. From my point of view they
tend to do the opposite (that is make the code less error-prone and/or 
easier to understand), which is indeed the purpose of the warnings in my 
view.

> That being said, the X-toolkit really invites sloppy programming by having
> many parameters in the defined functions that are not used for anything,
> or are used for something different than their declared type. I noticed

Agreed.

> also that the header situation in XBoard is quite poor: many variables
> shared between files are not declared in a header file, but just multiply
> declared in the files that use them (sometimes as different types!).

I noticed so, too.

> It would be good to clean up the code base in this respect. But it is
> indeed a concern in which branch to do this, which needs careful
> consideration. The branch that is currently developed the furthest is the
> 'aliennew' branch in my hgm.nubati.net repository. It forks off from
> master, but unfortunately master has already evolved since the fork to a
> point where it is no longer trivial to rebase aliennew to the head of
> master, although it is in principle my intention to keep it there. I am
> also not sure if aliennew is fully operational as XBoard compile; I only
> used it to release the 'WinBoard Alien Edition'.

It would nice to have a roadmap for the development of xboard.

Which features should go into 4.6.0, and which into later versions? 
Where do this aliennew branch at hgm.nubati.net fit in for this?

If we already have everything new for 4.6.0, then it would be time to 
concentrate on bugfixing so it can be ready for release.

Best regards
- Byrial