[bug #27699] Fairy pieces in variant normal

[Evgenii Philippov]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?27699>

                 Summary: Fairy pieces in variant normal
                 Project: XBoard
            Submitted by: None
            Submitted on: Wed 14 Oct 2009 10:23:37 AM UTC
                Category: None
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: None
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

    _______________________________________________________

Details:

XBoard in variant normal (with a "classic only" engine). In "Edit Position"
mode the piece menues (middle and right mouse button) offer you some fairy
pieces directly and probably all with "promote/demote". Most engines don't
welcome those "guests" on the board and xboard gets closed when entering
"analysis mode" (broken pipe).

Don't know if it's even worth the effort doing such cosmetic changes. Just
thought you might want to know.




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[Evgenii Philippov]

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #27699 (project xboard):

Well, I knew this was possible from the moment I added these pieces to the
menu, but it seems so obvious a wrong thing to do that I never bothered trying
to make it impossible. There are simpler ways to make XBoard close.

One has to strike a balance here between not making the menu unmanageably
large (which is done now by making some pieces available as promoted / demoted
versions of others) and ease to remember how to generate certain pieces. The
latter makes it important that it works the same in all variants. This opens
up the possibility that a piece you need can only be obtained by first
creating a piece that does not occur in the variant, and promoting / demoting
it later. Greying out the primary piece would interfere with that.

So I don't consider this a bug anymore than that there is a button with a
cross in the upper-right corner of the XBoard window that you better not press
during game play. Furthermore, if an engine exits because it does not like the
FEN it gets, this should be considered a bug of the engine. The WinBoard
protocol specs are quite clear about that: it should just give n error
message:

Illegal positions: Note that either setboard or edit can be used to send an
illegal position to the engine. The user can create any position with xboard's
Edit Position command (even, say, an empty board, or a board with 64 white
kings and no black ones). If your engine receives a position that it considers
illegal, I suggest that you send the response "tellusererror Illegal
position", and then respond to any attempted move with "Illegal move" until
the next new, edit, or setboard command.

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[Evgenii Philippov]

Update of bug #27699 (project xboard):

                  Status:                    None => Wont Fix              


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