Follow the Xboard development

[chessplayer]

Hello, if I want to follow the Xboard development, I can choose between two repositories (Git), one is on Savannah (GNU) and the other one is on Mr. HGM personal website. Which one do you suggest?

[H.G.Muller]

For the master and v4.7.x branch this should make little difference. Usually I push new commits first to the hgm.nubati repository, and only later to Savanah. (What goes to Savannah cannot be changed or reordered, so for partially completed work it is better to keep it out of Savannah until I am reasonably sure that it works well. And if it was done in many steps, I might combine some of them, like a new feature and all bug fixes that followed to get it working.) Sometimes, (when I am in a hurry for making a release) I push directly to Savannah, though. And if others push something to Savannah it might appear in hgm.nubati only when I pull from Savannah.

The hgm.nubati repository contains many experimental branches that Savannah does not have at all. Like the Alien Edition.

[chessplayer]

Does it really happen that you are in hurry for making a release? Or is Xboard a "we release when it's ready" model?

[H.G.Muller]

Well, it is Arun who does the official releases, and we tend to do them near holiday times, so it occurs quite often that I would like to do the release before he leaves on holiday, rather than waiting two or three weeks until he is back.

I just added a new branch to hgm.nubati.net, 'aliennewer', which is a version of the Alien Edition based on the latest development version (in master). Took me quite some effort to transfer all the patches, because the code had grown so different that the automatic process got lost. It especially did not like it if changes had to be made in a file that is now in a different directory, or even split into two files with different names from the original... I hope I did everything correctly. Under Linux it did at least compile, but I had no engine ready to test the Checkers, Reversi, Go and Amazons.

I haven't gotten to doing the patches for the large Shogi variants yet.

[chessplayer]

Thank you for you explanation.
Let me ask a question about patents: I just discovered that Gothic Chess was patented but the patent expired in 2006 (reference: Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_chess). Are there other patented games or planned in Xboard?

[H.G.Muller]

Both the patents on Gothic Chess and Falcon Chess have now expired. The only game that comes to mind is Omega Chess. This is actually marketed commercially. But it seems here that it is the equipment that is patented, not the rules.

Nebiyu Alien is already able to play Omega Chess under the latest development version (with legality testing off). This version even blacks out the squares of the 12x12 board that are inaccessible (the edges).