xboard 4.4.0
Hi,
I am looking for a maintainer of the new xboard 4.4.0, which will be shortly
released from the GNU-Savannah xboard project website. This new version
will be a merger of the never-released 4.2.pre8 still in the Savannah CVS, and
the latest vesrion from the 4.3 fork (4.3.pre16, where 4.3.15 was the last
released
version), for which I currently am the principal developer.
The latest XBoard version currently available from Debian is 4.2.7. The
current
Debian maintainers of XBoard 4.2.7 might not have time to adopt 4.4.0 as well
(so one of them told me), which is why I am applying to this mailing list.
In addition, I am looking for a maintainer of a package "fmax" for the
chess engine
"Fairy-Max", which is currently the preferred engine for XBoard, as (unlike
GNU Chess)
it offers the user many chess variants in addition to normal chess.
Currently no Debian
package for it exists.
Fairy-Max is a derivative of the 100-line chess program micro-Max, which has a
computer rating of over 2000 on the CCRL rating list. In Fairy-Max the
move-generator
tables are not hard coded, but loaded from a file at start-up, so it can be
easily configured
for playing chess variants featuring unorthodox chess pieces. The
pre-configured variants
(all playable through XBoard 4.4.0) in the current Fairy-Max distribution are:
normal chess
capablanca chess
gothic chess
courier chess
knightmate
superchess
cylinder chess
berolina chess
shatranj
xiangqi (Chinese chess)
Fairy-Max is a very simple project, containing 3 executables (all XBoard
engines, "fmax"
for most variants, and "shamax" and "maxqi" as dedicated engines for
shatranj and xiangqi,
respectively), the 3 C-source files for those, and the engine
initialization files "fmax.ini" and
"qmax.ini".
I am not an experienced Linux user, and Fairy-max has been mostly developed
under
Windows. XBoard engines being simple console-IO applications, however,
making a Linux
port of itwas quite trivial, and Fairy-Max compiles and runs under Linux
without problems.
I am not up to the task of forging it into a Debian package, though.
Regards,
H.G.
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