[Flightgear-devel] New fgfs-builder release; forking TerraGear

[Ralf G. <rge...@kn...>]

Hello!

As there have been commits on TerraGear CVS I had to update the Custom
Scenery patches, so therefore there is a new fgfs-builder release.

This release is currently only available as a tar-ball from
ftp://ftp.uni-duisburg.de/FlightGear/Misc_rag/fgfs-builder

Note that this also includes several patches to TerraGear, some of which
are build fixes, but also additions of tools such as ogrdecode and
modifications to shape-decode. A tool for using DEM data in any
GDAL-readable format called gdalchop is currently under development and
will serve to allow using e.g. the CGIAR preprocessed SRTM data, which
is delivered as GeoTIFF (with some unfortunate properties regarding the
tiling).

I had already submitted these patches to Curt, but it seems that within
about 8 months there hasn't been a single slot of time in which he was
able to review them. As I don't have access to TerraGear CVS and
probably won't get any in the near future, I have switched to managing
my additions locally with git, following the examples of others here on
the list (Pigeon, John, Hans Fugal, ...).

Keeping the patches up to date to CVS without having access to a proper
VCS would become a PITA otherwise.

Note that Custom Scenery also wants to go further on development and
enhancement of TerraGear. We will synchronise with the official
TerraGear CVS regularly and provided that acceptance of our patches is
probable we will submit our changes back.

However, given the past history of our submissions and the consistent
refusal by Curt to give at least one of the team CVS write-access to
make use of the VCS facilities (e.g. going out on a development branch),
we now plan to actively fork TerraGear.

This does not mean that additions and large changes may happen soon, but
it just relieves us of an important management burden for bringing
TerraGear forward and it should relieve Curt of our constant nagging. ;-)

Just to clarify once more, in case it wasn't clear already: There is no
bad mood behind this mail at all. We just want to move on.

TerraGear is being criticized for its current state and to a large
extent that criticism is justified. We would like to try enhancing it
and making it more useable. A proper development environment is one
requirement for the work that is ahead of us and while we would have
liked to have done that within the already pretty sparsely used
facilities, time has shown that it will not be possible so we're only
creating a proper platform for our work. We are not breaking up with
FlightGear, quite to the contrary.

Cheers,
Ralf