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

[Bruno Coudoin]

Le 19/08/2014 15:30, Bill Bogstad a écrit :
> 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.
>

Well, it is not that hard to fix in GCompris. We already have the parser 
in place and it is just a matter of adjusting the text parsing in input 
and output. Much easier than reusing Xboard code one way or another.

Bruno.