Polyglot 1.4.42b

[Michel]

PG 1.4.41b contained many bugs with regard to persistence of engine options.

In particular it was unusable on WB 4.3.15.

This version hopefully works correctly. The idea is of course that persistence (Polyglot remembering the engine options)
should "just work" without user intervention.

http://alpha.uhasselt.be/Research/Algeb ... t-release/

[Michel]

I did some testing with xboard 4.4 and persistence of UCI engine options seems to work as advertized.

E.g.

xboard -fcp fruit -fUCI -scp toga2 -sUCI

If you change options and then quit and restart xboard the options are preserved!

[H.G.Muller]

One question: What happens if the primary settings file that was given has the same name as the one that Polyglot constructs from the engine name (or that was given by the user)? Would that transparantly work? Or would it mes up the oriinal because it thinks almost no settings have changed, and thus save only part of the settings back? I can imagine that there are users that would like to have their option settings for a given engine in one place, rather than distributed over two files, and it would be nice if using the default name of the persistance file would allow them to do that.

Rather than putting a lot of PG_ pefixed filenames all in the WinBoard directory, whouldn't it be better to save them all in a sub-directory PG (or .pg)? Keeping files in a different directory seems a superior way of organization from having to go on parts of the names.

In the beta2 version of the installer package, I put the polyglot.ini in a separate folder PG to not clutter up the WinBoard folder, and avoid name collissions between (indirection) ini files for WinBoard shortcuts and polyglot.ini files.

[Michel]

One question: What happens if the primary settings file that was given has the same name as the one that Polyglot constructs from the engine name (or that was given by the user)? Would that transparantly work? Or would it mes up the oriinal because it thinks almost no settings have changed, and thus save only part of the settings back?

I am afraid that this is what would happen. Of course PG could detect this name collision and in this special case save all settings rather than just
the changed ones. But there is also the problem that the engine specific ini file is relative to the classical ini file (if present). If you then
take out the classical ini file you may lose the value of some options. This not an issue of course if you use -noini.

My motivation for choosing the current architecture was the following. Suppose that you do

xboard -fcp fruit -fUCI

Then polyglot has to find (and store) the options for the engine fruit somewhere. An ini file based on the name of the engine seemed to be the
most natural choice. But to get the name of the engine PG has to start the engine first. And to do this it may need the classical ini file
(which currently is polyglot_1st.ini).

Rather than putting a lot of PG_ pefixed filenames all in the WinBoard directory, whouldn't it be better to save them all in a sub-directory PG (or .pg)? Keeping files in a different directory seems a superior way of organization from having to go on parts of the names.

I wasn't aware that on windows the current directory would typically be the WinBoard directory. Then yes. Storing them in a subfolder
is a good idea.

On Linux they should go in $HOME/.polyglot. I guess Linux users would be mature enough to know that the user specific configfiles for PG would be stored in this directory.