About egtpath defaults

[Miguel A. Ballicora]

The engine settings dialog has a default for egtpath that can be set up at start up with

Code: Select all

-defaultPathEGTB filename
    Gives the name of the directory where the end-game tablebases are installed, for UCI engines. Default: "/usr/local/share/egtb".


But I use my own tablebases (Gaviota) so I send

-egtFormats "gaviota:/home/miguel/gaviotatb" at start up.

The latter works fine, but I wonder what the relationship with this is the default in the settings dialog. Is it a general path to what type of tablebases? Nalimov? in which case are they sent to the engine?

Miguel

[H.G.Muller]

-defaultPathEGTB is really a deprecated option / menu item, provided only for backward compatibility with Winboard_x. There it was only used by UCI engines, having Polyglot pass it as the standard UCI options for the Nalimov path. UCI does not have standard options for other EGT formats (e.g. bitbases).

In WinBoard I implemented it such that the -defaultPathEGTB option is ignored for WB engines when -egtFormats is defined as a on-empty string. If no -egtFormats arument is given, though, it uses the -defaultPathEGTB option as path for the nalimov format. I guess UCI engines run with an old Polyglot would continue to use the -defaultPathEGTB argument. But Polyglots that support the WB protocol extensions would behave undistinguishable from WinBoard engines.