Cute Chess hackathon 2023

On the last week of July, we held our annual Cute Chess hackathon. For this year’s hackathon I had only one goal: get the 1.3.0 release out.

After the hackathon in 2022, I had committed automatic Windows installer generation to the GitHub Actions release workflow and had released 1.3.0-beta4. Due to family issues and interests in other topics, I decided to switch my focus from Cute Chess until the next hackathon.

I spent the first days of the hackathon ensuring that the release process still works. 1.3.0-beta4 was released at the end of 2022 and there had been a changes in GitHub Actions since then, for example, Ubuntu OS updates.

After fixing issues in the AppImage and Windows installer generation, I turned my focus to switching Xboard protocol parsing away from QStringRef to QStringView. To recap: QStringRef is deprecated in Qt 6 (but we can still use it with the Qt 5 compatibility library) and we need to eventually switch to QStringView. This is not a simple search-and-replace however, because of the way we use QStringRef and the lack of full unit test suite.

On the second day of the hackathon, we (finally) released version 1.3.0.

After watching a film on how the Atomic Age started, I created a PR#768 for switching the Xboard protocol parsing to QStringView. More testing is needed to avoid regressions.

There turned out to be bugs in the 1.3.0 release (of course) and at the end of the hackathon we released version 1.3.1.