Re: [Flightgear-devel] route manager crash

[James T. <ja...@fl...>]

> On 27 Jun 2018, at 12:17, Tobias Dammers <tda...@gm...> wrote:
> 
> Maybe a good middle ground would be to write doc comments that are
> enough to figure out how stuff works with a bit of effort, but no README
> yet, and possibly even mark unstable parts as such.

Yes, that can work, I will try to do that indeed. 
> 
> Yes, age-old problem. Best solution is to get more people involved. Hmm,
> chicken, eggs, etc.

Yeah, I did ask for people to get involved with the route/AP/waypoint code some years ago (and some good feedback at the time) but nothing much recently.

> It's still confusing to have half a dozen parameters, all of them with
> useful descriptive names, and then one that's just "parameter". "A hold
> is defined by 6 parameters: a fix, a radial, whether it's left-handed or
> right-handed, whether the radial defines the inbound or outbound leg,
> the length of an individual leg, and a parameter" - uh, wait, what, so
> what is this magical 'parameter' about that you're not telling me
> anything more specific?

I guess this is just my feeling that time/distnace is somehow special, but again this is my opinion, if you don’t agree there is something intrinsically special about it, then the name is certainly confusing.

>> 
>> Maybe I’m confused now - I thought this was: the hold time, for a
>> time-based hold, and the hold distance, for a distance-based hold?
>> Have I misunderstood?
> 
> I thought we were talking about hold_by, which just indicates whether
> hold_time_or_distance holds a time in seconds or a distance in nautical
> miles. hold_time_or_distance is as good as it gets as far as names go, I
> think; the alternative I thought of would be hold_leg_length, but I
> don't think that's much better.
> 

Ah ok - so hold_by is just a proxy for calling hold_is_distance or hold_is_time?

In which case I’d rather people use the methods which return bool - since StringAreEvilAndCauseMallocs(TM) 

BTW, I’d like to try and fix the crash tonight, but I’m lacking a suitable data file to trigger it - can you share a procedure file (off list if necessary) I can test against, and some steps to follow with the UFO? Or do I need to use the CRJ?

Kind regards,
James