Status update June 2022

Last month I implemented CMake support for Cute Chess. This month I did further development by implementing make install support and working on AppImage creation.

It’s now possible to install Cute Chess from source by issuing the make install command. Figuring out why -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX didn’t work as I thought required reading a lot of documentation and reviewing other projects' CMakeLists.txt files. In summary: look at the GnuInstallDirs include option.

While working on implementing AppImage support, I noticed that we need a way to represent the current version number of Cute Chess in simple form. The version could be defined in CMakeLists.txt file but using the version in an external tool would require parsing CMakeLists.txt. We could parse git output but we need to support systems that do not have git installed.

While thinking about this problem I remembered that KeepassXC had a tool called release-tool in their source tree which handled many of these issues automatically. There was also an article by Drew DeVault in which he talks about the ways open-source software releases can go wrong.

I decided to create our own release-tool to help ensure consistent releases. The tool is still work-in-progress and not yet merged. My plan is to use to tool to release Cute Chess 1.3.0-beta1 in July.

That’s all I have for this month, see you in the next one!