[gcompris-devel] gcompri version: compris 13.11-1 chess dies unexpectedly

[Bill Bogstad]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 4:40 AM, Bruno Coudoin
<bruno.coudoin at gcompris.net> wrote:
> Le 18/08/2014 17:22, Bill Bogstad a écrit :
>> On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 5:53 AM, Bruno Coudoin
>> <bruno.coudoin at gcompris.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I am not willing to fix this, it is too annoying to make a parser that
>>> can work with the different versions of GnuChess we may find on the
>>> different GNU/Linux distributions.
>>
>> I'm wondering if it might be better to use an interface designed for
>> program<->program
>> communications rather then one designed for humans.   XChess for example can
>> talk to GNU Chess and apparently uses an interface intended for
>> programmatic use.   This page has a link to a Chess Engine
>> communications protocol document which might help:
>>
>> http://www.tim-mann.org/engines.html
>>
>> If there are in fact lots of chess "engines" out there that use this
>> protocol, it would make GCompris less dependent on GNU Chess as well.
>>
>
> Hi,
>
> This is exactly what I use but as you can see this is a textual
> interface, not an API. They mention several version of it and maybe we
> could update GCompris to parse and generate the latest version.

My mistake.   Certainly not an API, more like a poorly designed network protocol
for transmitting chess related information/commands.   With well
designed protocols,
you can ignore stuff that you don't understand and still manage to get the job
done.   Thinking that way about GNU chess's implementation of
the "protocol" might help.

Another possibility is to borrow the parser from the Xboard program.
I can't tell from a quick look but one would hope
that their parser is designed to work with multiple versions of GNU chess.
It certainly works with multiple chess/game engines.  Unfortunately, the
parser isn't  in a nice clean library.   So you might have to maintain
your own modified version of the Xboard source.   How much work that would
be and whether the advantage of making Gcompris more compatible with
Debian is not for me to say.

Bill Bogstad