Waxman secret update Dec 18th 2008?

Discussions about Winboard/Xboard. News about engines or programs to use with these GUIs (e.g. tournament managers or adapters) belong in this sub forum.

Moderator: Andres Valverde

Waxman secret update Dec 18th 2008?

Postby Guenther Simon » 21 Jan 2009, 21:12

Aaarghh, it seems it was never communicated through fora
or any public source that the first Waxman 2008 release
was 2 weeks later secretly updated because of a serious bug?

I started testing it a few days ago and of course still had the original
release exe from Dec. 4th, because there never was a newer version announced.
It swallowed characters from the sent WB commands and answered them with
Illegal move messages.
I first thought it only happened to the time/otim commands which
sometimes where received as 'ime' 'oim' and other words missing a char.
Then I disabled the 'Illegal move' messages with Inbetween and it seemed to play
correctly until I noticed that it sometimes did not send any info and in
one game started to ponder. Looking at the debugs I saw now that it
also screwed up sometimes a char for the WB commands 'post, hard and easy'
which explained above behaviour.
I searched the fora and other sources and I found no infos about this
severe bug, thus I stopped testing and tried the last thing and looked
for a different time stamped exe download from the Waxman site.
Well I found one and this readme. I hope this post helps all who had
downloaded the first buggy one too and missed the secret one.


Guenther

Code: Select all

12/06/08 - Final 2008 release.

12/11/08 - Not so fast! Reports of erratic behavior, undetected by all
           previous testing, by a tournament organizer...

12/13/08 - The problem is traced to WAXMAN's I/O thread running wild on
           a multi-core processor. Suddenly, multi-threading seems more
           hassle than it's worth. I swallow my pride and go back to the
           single-threaded model. Polling the input port judiciously,
           WAXMAN's performance does not suffer.
           
12/18/08 - Final final 2008 release.
User avatar
Guenther Simon
 
Posts: 794
Joined: 26 Sep 2004, 19:49
Location: Regensburg, Germany

Return to Winboard and related Topics

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 17 guests