Re: [Flightgear-devel] FMS data file locations - proposal to avoid

[Scott H. <sco...@po...>]

On Sun, 2010-02-28 at 21:06 +0000, willie wrote:
> Martin Spott wrote:
> 
> > In general I appreciate this idea. Basically it depends on under which
> > license these files are being published.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 	Martin.
> from the README in A380/FMS/
> 
> "This directory contains SID/STAR database files in 'Level-D 767' format
> from Flight1 Software http://www.flight1.com/products.asp?product=ld767fsx
> this software uses a GPL released parser for this format, written with
> permission of Flight1 Software." .....
> 
> 
> and from
> http://www.navdata.at/php/sidstar/dl_icao.php?addon=LDS767&sort=
> source of the actual data itself
> "All data here is freeware and MAY NOT be used, recompiled,
> interpretted, linked or distributed for ANY purpose without the express
> WRITTEN consent of the author. COMMERCIAL USE of this data is STRICTLY
> prohibited!"
> 
> So we'd need to contact the individual authors and ask nicely. However I
> think we could make the structure available and let folks download the
> procedures they want individually.
> 	 --
> Best Regards
> Willie Fleming


 The navdata.at site I found to be the best, the owner has entered
 into an agreement with a well known data provider. I tried contacting
 the owner to see what the status of re-distribution of the files would
 be, I got no response. It seems some of the files on that site are made
 by the community, but the majority are generated by the owner from data
 provided by Navigraph.

 The first step would be to agree on a common format,  there are many
 formats for this data. I chose the Level-D 767 format because it was
 XML and there seemed to be enough data files available, both for a
 fee and for free. 

 If the same format was chosen for all aircraft, then either my parser
 could be made global, or preferably rewritten in C++, perhaps as part
 of the autopilot code.
 At the moment the main methods returns an array of fmsWP, so it still
 requires some work within the aircraft (for example the calculation of
 the T/D) that requires some knowledge of the performance of the
 aircraft. So a little more work to abstract that in to a library
 would also be needed.

 When I find some time, I'd like to re-write some of the code around
 this area for Liams A340-600 as a lot of it is not very pretty, the
 term 'spaghetti' springs to mind. 

 So I like your idea of moving these files in to a common area, but they
 will almost certainly remain up to the user to download and "install".
 I had a good search and couldn't find any GPL licensed files out there.


 S.