Re: [XBoard-devel] WinBoard installer

[Eric Mullins]

h.g. muller wrote:
> True, but I expect there is a large group of users that will want to 
> analyze
> games with the strongest engines they can lay their hand on, which means
> they will want to use Crafty (WB) ,Toga (UCI) or Glaurung (UCI) if 
> they want
> a free engine, and Rybka (UCI) if they are willing to pay for it. Not 
> providing
> automatic UCI support will greatly reduce the appreciation fo our 
> product.
>
> > But it's still great to also have a "gold pack" with everything you
> > need to get started doing more complicated things.  I think that could
> > either be a separate installer package, or (if the person working on
> > the installer wants to do it), it would be cool to have one installer
> > that has an options screen that lets you check more things to
> > download.
>
> This is more or less the idea. Jaap told me this was not very difficult.
> I think bandwidth is a valid concern, though. I would not want every 
> install
> to start with a 100MB download, out of which only 1MB is used then for
> people selecting the minimal install.
>
> But we should see things in perspective, and below a certain size, I 
> don't
> think we should worry. E.g. some (uncompressed) file sizes:
>
> 1.153 KB  winboard.exe
>   860 KB  wcrafty.exe
>   428 KB  GNUChes5.exe
>   101 KB  GNUChess.exe
> 3.624 KB  book.dat             (GNU Chess book distributed with 4.2.7b)
>     28 KB  polyglot.exe
>     18 KB  fairymax.exe
C:\chess\WinBoard>objdump -p gnuches5.exe | grep DLL
vma:            Hint    Time      Forward  DLL       First
      DLL Name: cygwin1.dll
      DLL Name: cygreadline5.dll
      DLL Name: KERNEL32.dll

From my chess utils path:
08/10/2003  04:17 PM           151,552 cygreadline5.dll
06/12/2008  11:35 AM         1,872,884 cygwin1.dll

Polyglot may also depend on cygwin1.dll, depending where you got it.  
There is a version that doesn't depend on it though.  I'm not sure I'd 
recommend that one, however.

I have a .REG file that I use to set up the PGN file type to invoke 
winboard in analysis mode.  This has fcp as polyglot, and then I just 
hand-modify the INI file for whatever engine I want to analyze with.  
That process could be fine-tuned and automated to make it easy on end 
users to select the analysis engine.  I don't ever use WB engines 
though, so I'm not sure what else might be necessary to support crafty 
in that process.

For analysis, there's no need for a book.  People may want some kind of 
endgame bases though-- MUCH larger than a book. heh.

(Forgive the duplicate message, I'm not mailing list savvy and replied 
to HGM originally.