Re: [chessx-developer] auto-install of engines on Linux

[Jens N. <jen...@gm...>]

Dear Mr. Muller,

generally, your idea sounds feasible and easy enough to implement.

I have a few comments:
1) ChessX tries to support all three major OS with the same features, so I would like engine vendors
to provide installation information as described in the folder for GenericData, which would be 
Mac OS X: "~/Library/Application Support", "/Library/Application Support"
Windows: "C:/Users/<USER>/AppData/Local", "C:/ProgramData"
Linux: "~/.local/share", "/usr/local/share", "/usr/share"
and from there .../games/plugins/uci/<vendor> and ..../xboard/<vendor> respectively.

2) Your description format would require a dedicated (if simple) parser while most development environments support
either parsing XML or ini-file syntax.
In this case, I would prefer ini-file syntax, so I think, the eng file would better look like this:
[installation]
name=Stockfish-5-32 (missing in your description)
plugin spec=0.0
command=stockfish
cd=<installation path>
variants=chess,chess960
Using ini files would make import more or less a one-liner in C++.

3) If I remember correctly, the file suffix .eng was used by Chessbase for some engines or engine loaders.
At least, I remember seeing such files in a Chessbase directory, I actually never looked into the file 
if it was a binary or a text file. So using *.eng could confuse users.

Kind regards,

Jens Nissen

BTW: From 
https://sourceforge.net/p/chessx/feature-requests/
the button "Create Ticket" creates a change request.

Am 15.11.2014 um 00:13 schrieb H.G. Muller <h.g...@hc...>:

> Dear ChessX developers,
> 
> sorry that I contact you this way; I could not figure out how to use the 
> sourceforge trackers to submit a feature request.
> 
> I am the current developer of XBoard, and I am trying to set up a system 
> for Linux to eleminate the need for users to 'install' engines that are 
> already installed by the package-managinging system into the GUIs where 
> they want to use them (as is also needed in ChessX through the 
> Edit->Preferences->Engine tab). The system is very simple, and I hope 
> that ChessX would implement it too.
> 
> The idea is that engine packages, as part of their install, would drop a 
> small file in a system standard directory reserved for the particular 
> protocol the engine speaks. E.g. Stockfish would drop a file
> 
> /usr/[local/]share/games/plugins/uci/stockfish.eng
> 
> A UCI-supporting GUI would then scan this directory for *.eng files to 
> know what UCI engines are currently installed, and from the modify date 
> of the file it could see when it was installed. As it also knows the 
> modify date of its own settings file that contains its engine list, it 
> can know if the engine is newly installed or has been seen before. If it 
> is new, it can add it to the list (possibly under control of a user 
> option to switch such auto-installs on or off).
> 
> To add it to its engine list, it would of course need to have some info 
> that normally would be provided by the user that installs it. Such as 
> engine startup command (possibly including command-line arguments), and 
> the engine directory. (It would already know the engine is UCI, or it 
> would not have been in that folder.) This info comes from the contents 
> of the .eng file, which (for now) is just 3 lines:
> 
> plugin spec 0.0
> stockfish
> chess,chess960
> 
> The first line providing some version number that identifies the file 
> format (so that in the future it can easily be extended with more info), 
> the second line being the engine startup command to run it in the 
> applicable protocol, and the third line what games/variants it can play 
> (for now only chess and chess960 are defined). A GUI that only supports 
> Chess would obviously have to ignore any engine that does not list 
> "chess" on the third line.
> 
> For engines that have to run in a specific directory a cd command to 
> that directory would be prefixed to its startup command on the second 
> line, like
> 
> cd ENGINEDIR;ENGINECOMMAND
> 
> This should provide the GUI with some minimal information needed to 
> append the engine to its engine list. I hope to extend the standard in 
> the future by also listing other info that could be relevant for the 
> GUI, e.g. known non-compliancies with the protocol for which the GUI 
> might have work-around options that could correct it. (E.g. when an 
> engine reports scores with the wrong sign when playing black.)
> 
> For XBoard protocol (CECP) the corresponding directory would be
> 
> /usr/[local/]share/games/plugins/xboard/
> 
> Would you be willing to equip ChessX with such an auto-install system? 
> The incentive for engine authors to adopt this system will be 
> proportional to the number of GUI's that do so, and vice versa. So I am 
> trying to collect some critical mass to get it off the ground.
> 
> Kindest regards,
> H.G.Muller
> 
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