This is not a bug, and not even a valid item for a wish list, as the
functionality
is already provided in the current stable version.
For one, testing engines at fixed depth is a completely useless way
to evaluate them. No modern engine has a fixed-depth search, and the
depth they report as 'nominal depth' is related to the typical search depth
in a different way for each engine. Limiting search depth leads to a very
unrealistic distribution of thinking time over the game, ~0% of the time being
allocated to the end-game, and th enine playing like an idiot there as a
result.
Limiting the number of nodes searched is much better way to limit engines
to very low search depth (that can no longer be reliably timed), and is
supported
in XBoard 4.3.14 and higher through th -firsNPS and -secondNPS options.
Secondly, for these kind of uncommon settings, XBoard already provides the
general options -firstInitString and -secondInitString. These options are
there
to send special settings on a per-engine basis, which are so rarey used that
it does not pay to make separate options for them. The effect the reporter
of this 'bug' wants to acheive can be achieved by:
xboard -firstInitString "new\nsd N\n" -secondInitString "new\nsd M\n"
where N and M are the desired depth limits.
H.G. Muller, upstream XBoard developer
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