Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist Description: Opening book for gnuchess This is the opening book for gnuchess. It was formerly distributed together with gnuchess, now it has been separated due to size and architecture-independence. It is recommended that you install it if you want to use gnuchess.
Upstream URL is ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/chess/book_1.00.pgn.gz License is Public Domain. The book was part of the gnuchess source until version 5.02, since then it is also not part of the gnuchess Debian package anymore. It used to stall the slower buildd's but along with the format of the binary book also the algorithm of building it has changed, and it is now several orders of magnitude faster. Regarding the license, there was a short thread on -legal on it, and I finally got the following from Stuart Cracraft, who put the book together. We need to keep the book. It is not acceptable that the book not be included with GNU Chess. GNU Chess strength based on quality of moves early in the game as well as building up significant time for middle-game computation are drastically halved in the absence of a solid book. I personally built the GNU Chess book from a large set of FREE game collections from the University of Pittsburgh chess server. These are NOT copyrighted and are PUBLIC. I also wrote the code for the GNU Chess book without any reference at all to any other author. It is GNU Chess code and PUBLIC book that is non-copyrightable. --Stuart I have contacted the maintainer of the gnuchess package several times about adding a package for the opening book, but have received no comments on this suggestion. In order for the book to be useful, bug #144705 has to be addressed. I intend to NMU gnuchess if this one (and, by the way, also #162701) is not fixed in the near future. Lukas -- Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion. -- Oscar Wilde