Re: mime types

[h.g.muller]

>..., perhaps we should change the file names a bit?

Are the filenames really used for anything? I did not think mutch on them,
because I assumed that they were just dummies used to offer the info to
the system, and that all information would be in the html, and extracted
to be stored in another format/organization when you ran the xdg command.

>I think viewer and tourney are to general (for
>viewer I would expect a jpeg browser or a pdf viewer or something like
>that and tourney could be any game).

Well, I will change it to pgn-viewer.desktop and xboard-tourney then?
Of course the idea is that XBoard will eventually play any game... ;-)
After I've done that, I guess you could pull anything in, if we are also happy
with the Comment and GenericNames I defined in the desktop files.

What should still be solved is how to include this stuff in make-install.
PerhapsArun could have a look at that.

A good question is whether we should also provide desktop files to
run XBoard on FICS and ICC (WinBoard creates start-menu items for
those). They would not be associated with any mime type, but they would
come in handy in the menus. (Although we could define amime type for
user ICS logon files, so that they can log in to an ICS of their choice by
clicking the correponding logon file.)

[Arun Persaud]

Hi

> [file names of .desktop files]

> Are the filenames really used for anything? I did not think mutch on them,
> because I assumed that they were just dummies used to offer the info to
> the system, and that all information would be in the html, and extracted
> to be stored in another format/organization when you ran the xdg command.

AFAIK all .desktop files can be used on the desktop to create clickable
icons. xboard.desktop gets installed in /usr/share/applications/ and
therefore would create a conflict if it is named similar to other
packages. At the moment I'm not sure where we a distribution would store
desktop files that we want to use just for mime-types association, but I
think clearer names that will avoid conflicts is a good idea...

> What should still be solved is how to include this stuff in make-install.
> PerhapsArun could have a look at that.

I will, should be easy to add to the make file and building of the rpms

> A good question is whether we should also provide desktop files to
> run XBoard on FICS and ICC (WinBoard creates start-menu items for
> those). They would not be associated with any mime type, but they would
> come in handy in the menus. (Although we could define amime type for
> user ICS logon files, so that they can log in to an ICS of their choice by
> clicking the correponding logon file.)

We could provide some for ICS and FICS, but if people want to use other
ones, I think it perhaps would make more sense to add a section in the
documentation on how to do this in general, e.g. copy xboard.desktop and
modify line xyz...

cheers

Arun

[h.g.muller]

>At the moment I'm not sure where we a distribution would store
>desktop files that we want to use just for mime-types association, but I
>think clearer names that will avoid conflicts is a good idea...

I understood from Byrial that we cannot just store these files somewhere,
butthat they should be installed bythe commands:

xdg-mime install --mode system --novendor xboard.xml
xdg-desktop-menu install --mode system --novendor pgn-viewr.desktop
... // other desktop files
xdg-icon-resource install --context mimetypes --size 48 pixmaps/board48.xpm
application-x-chess-pgn
xdg-icon-resource install --context mimetypes --size 48 pixmaps/cross48.xpm
x-xboard-pgn
... // other icon sizes

>I will, should be easy to add to the make file and building of the rpms

OK, but we should not make a developer release before this is done,
so it will be tested too.

>We could provide some for ICS and FICS, but if people want to use other
>ones,

Do you know any other ones? Except for my own ICS, I don't think any exist.

[Byrial Jensen]

Den 04-01-2012 09:40, h.g. muller skrev:
>
>> At the moment I'm not sure where we a distribution would store
>> desktop files that we want to use just for mime-types association, but I
>> think clearer names that will avoid conflicts is a good idea...
>
> I understood from Byrial that we cannot just store these files somewhere,
> butthat they should be installed bythe commands:

Right, leave it to the xdg-* commands to find the right places for
installation. They use environment variables which may not contain the
defaults to find the installation directories, and they make sure to
update GNOME/KDE/Whatever desktop system in the right ways.

But still it would be a good idea to avoid possible name conflicts by
starting names with "xboard-".

[h.g.muller]

>But still it would be a good idea to avoid possible name conflicts by
>starting names with "xboard-".

But PGN is not an XBoard format, it is a general Chess concept. If there is
another PGN viewer,
we would want to obliterate its association with PGN files, right? Only one
viewer can start when
you click a PGN file, so possibly overwriting a competing
pgn-viewer.desktop seems a good thing.
Or am I missing something?

[Byrial Jensen]

Den 04-01-2012 10:07, h.g. muller skrev:
>
>> But still it would be a good idea to avoid possible name conflicts by
>> starting names with "xboard-".
>
> But PGN is not an XBoard format, it is a general Chess concept. If there
> is another PGN viewer,
> we would want to obliterate its association with PGN files, right?

No, we would not want that. Xboard can tell the system that it is
capable of handling PGN files, but it should not interfere with other
programs doing the same. That would be considered a bad thing to do, and
would not be tolerated by the distributions' packagers.

 > Only
> one viewer can start when
> you click a PGN file, so possibly overwriting a competing
> pgn-viewer.desktop seems a good thing.
> Or am I missing something?

Indeed. Compete by merits, not by overwriting the competitor's files.
This is not a war between programs. Leave it to the users to choose
which viewer they want to use.

[h.g.muller]

Well, rename them anyway you think right, then. As Arun has already pushed
everything to Savannah,
it makes little sense for me to do it in hgm.nubati.net.

[Arun Persaud]

On 01/04/2012 01:07 AM, h.g. muller wrote:

>
>> But still it would be a good idea to avoid possible name conflicts by
>> starting names with "xboard-".
>
> But PGN is not an XBoard format, it is a general Chess concept. If there
> is another PGN viewer,
> we would want to obliterate its association with PGN files, right? Only
> one viewer can start when
> you click a PGN file, so possibly overwriting a competing
> pgn-viewer.desktop seems a good thing.
> Or am I missing something?

the way it works is that the desktop will register xboard as one
possibility to handle this mime-type and when the user clicks on the
file it will list all possibilities (if there is more than one) and ask
the user what she wants to do and normally offer a "do you want to do
this always from now on" option... so at that point the user can then
choose to always use xboard for example. It will also list all
applications when you right-click on a file under "open with"...

When I do that on a pdf I get evince (my default) and acrobat as well as
some other applications such as inkscape.

We also won't need to use all the xdg-* commands directly, since almost
all distributions will have macros for that during rpm-creation.

I'll see if I can get it running for the deb and rpm packages we build.

cheers
        ARUN

[Arun Persaud]

Hi

> Do you know any other ones? Except for my own ICS, I don't think any exist.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/chess/computer/part1/

lists 4 different IP-addresses, but I'm not sure if they are still
active... years ago I sometimes logged into a FICS clone in europe
somewhere...

Arun

[Tim Mann]

Some of the ones linked from http://tim-mann.org/ics.html still work.

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 9:06 AM, Arun Persaud <apersaud@...> wrote:

Hi

> Do you know any other ones? Except for my own ICS, I don't think any exist.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/chess/computer/part1/

lists 4 different IP-addresses, but I'm not sure if they are still
active... years ago I sometimes logged into a FICS clone in europe
somewhere...

Arun

[h.g.muller]

Some of the ones linked from http://tim-mann.org/ics.html still work.

Indeed they do! On Chess.net and German FICS I could even log in.
For Chess Any Time the web pge was up, but I could not connect with telnet,
so maybe they changed to another server type. Just a handful of players
on the other two, though (On the German one only computers.)

Btw, if you still update that list you might add mine as well:

Variant ICS at 80.100.28.169 . (I never bothered to take a domain name...)
Also no people there, BTW. But it is more capable than the others, as of
course I hacked it, and besides Chess / Bughouse, as in the open-source
version, you can play Crazyhouse, Fischerandom, Shatranj, Gothic / Capablanca
(on 10x8 board), Knightmate, Spartan Chess, Grand Chess, Superchess,
Great Shatranj, Xiangqi and Shogi there. All through Winboard, of course!

And likely there will be another one soon, operated by Yasser Seirawan,
where there could be a lot of human players (but they all want to play
Seirawan Chess :-))) ). As I will be setting that up for him.

[h.g.muller]

Some of the ones linked from http://tim-mann.org/ics.html still work.

Oh yes, and based on the number of visitors on these other ones,
I vote for only including a menu item for FICS. After all, XBoard is free
software on a free platform, so why support a commercial server like ICC?

[Tim Mann]

Danny Sleator is a friend and I used to be an admin at ICC, so I'd like to keep supporting them. I'm not a doctrinaire "everything must be free" guy.

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 12:56 PM, h.g. muller <h.g.muller@...> wrote:

Some of the ones linked from http://tim-mann.org/ics.html still work.

Oh yes, and based on the number of visitors on these other ones,
I vote for only including a menu item for FICS. After all, XBoard is free
software on a free platform, so why support a commercial server like ICC?

[Daniel Mehrmann]

ICC isn't a commercial server like chessbase one. It's more like a club or union. So yes, they take money from their members, but they just given them back for examples "live grandmaster" events and "live commentaries". If you would read the ICC club policy you would know that the target isn't a big win like a typical company.

So what's the difference between FICS? It's no big deal. FICS lives from donations and ICC just takes the donations from there members.

Regards
Daniel
--
Diese Nachricht wurde von meinem Android-Mobiltelefon mit K-9 Mail gesendet.

"h.g. muller" <h.g.muller@...> schrieb:

Some of the ones linked from http://tim-mann.org/ics.html still work.

Oh yes, and based on the number of visitors on these other ones,
I vote for only including a menu item for FICS. After all, XBoard is free
software on a free platform, so why support a commercial server like ICC?

[h.g.muller]

Hi Daniel,
long time no see!

So you are in favor of including an ICC desktop file as well? We do that
with WinBoard, so why not?

[Daniel Mehrmann]

Yes!

Regards
Daniel
--
Diese Nachricht wurde von meinem Android-Mobiltelefon mit K-9 Mail gesendet.

"h.g. muller" <h.g.muller@...> schrieb:

Hi Daniel,
long time no see!

So you are in favor of including an ICC desktop file as well? We do that 
with WinBoard, so why not?

[h.g.muller]

Can we do 'menu groups', like with WinBoard?
Or must all menu items we supply through desktop files go directly in the
'games' menu?

With a separate menu group there would be little reason to economize on the
number of items.
We could easily include separate items for connecting to FICS, to ICC,
perhaps to
Yasser Seirawan's new ICS, to start WinBoard in default mode, to start it with
traditional oriental board look for Xiangqi, etc.

That reminds me of another issue:

For WinBoard I also put items in the system menus for accessing documentation,
like a README file, which is a html page linking to other docs of stuff in
the install,
including a html-based tutorial on the use of WinBoard,with lots of
screenshots.
This to provide some easily accessible documentation for novice users; the
official
help file / man page has too much the character of a reference manual, and does
unfortunatly little else than convince the very few that bother to read it
that WinBoard
is to complex for them, and they'd better look for another GUI.

It seems a bit illogical to have the reference manual available from the
WinBoard
help menu, but the tutorial from the system start menu. Perhaps they should
both
be in the help menu?

[Byrial Jensen]

Den 05-01-2012 13:35, h.g. muller skrev:
> Can we do 'menu groups', like with WinBoard?

It can be done, but is quite simple. The menu group is specified by a
.directory file which is similar to the .desktop files, and the
integration into the menu system is described in a .menu file which
contains XML.

See http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/index.html for
details.

[Byrial Jensen]

Den 06-01-2012 01:24, Byrial Jensen skrev:
> Den 05-01-2012 13:35, h.g. muller skrev:
>> Can we do 'menu groups', like with WinBoard?
>
> It can be done, but is quite simple. The menu group is specified by a

I intended to write: It can be done, but it is NOT quite simple.

> .directory file which is similar to the .desktop files, and the
> integration into the menu system is described in a .menu file which
> contains XML.
>
> See http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/index.html for
> details.
>

[Arun Persaud]

On 01/05/2012 04:24 PM, Byrial Jensen wrote:

> Den 05-01-2012 13:35, h.g. muller skrev:
>> Can we do 'menu groups', like with WinBoard?
>
> It can be done, but is quite simple. The menu group is specified by a
> .directory file which is similar to the .desktop files, and the
> integration into the menu system is described in a .menu file which
> contains XML.
>
> See http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/index.html for
> details.

not sure how other desktops are handling this nowadays, but gnome 3
doesn't have a menu anymore where you could have menu-groups as in a
"start" menu on windows... at least I haven't seen it yet. Even in gnome
2 I never really used this, but that might be just me ;)
I'm not sure if it's worthwhile adding this...

cheers

ARUN