On Mon, Sep 24, 2018 at 9:04 AM Dirk Hohndel <d...@hohndel.org> wrote:
>
> (a) a dive site, as an independent entity from a dive, does have a
> logical GPS location. One can argue where that is and in many ways
> that's a matter of taste and opinion (e.g., is it where you enter the water,
> or is it where the "interesting" part of the dive happens), but in general
> a dive site has just one coordinate.
I'd actually argue that a dive site could be described as an "area",
not a single point, but I think your argument that a "dive" and a
"divesite" are entirely separate things is correct.
> (b) a dive itself can be described in multiple ways.
> (1) Simply by the coordinates of the site.
> (2) by the entry and exit point.
> (3) by the path that the diver actually took (turning the whole dive profile
> into a 3D path).
>
> Today we do (b)(1).
Yes.
Except I'd go even further, and say that we could have a fourth case:
a dive could be described as simply a location, *WITHOUT* having a
dive site associated with it.
Because I'd be a lot happier about our divesite handling if we didn't
force a dive to be associated with a site.
I think a dive site exists independently of any dives. A dive site it
about having a location, a description, and a name, but is *not*
defined by you diving it.
And similarly, you can have a dive without having a "site". Even if
the dive has a single location, that location may not be a "site".
The most common case of that "non-site" case is drift-dives, where you
might drift between possibly several sites (or drift into or out of
one).
But people literally do blackwater dives too, where you absolutely do
*not* have a site at all. You're literally just in a fairly random
location. You're doing it for
So what I think would be better is that we separate the dive sites
from the location further.
For example, I'd love to have a dive site database, but I'd love that
database to have *NOTHING* to do with the dives I do. It would be
literally used only to look up names based on the GPS coordinates I
have.
If subsurface would take my GPS coordinates, and automatically name
the location of my dives, that would be really cool. I could still
edit the name (without editing the dive site database), because many
of the places I dive, there's a buoy that can take me to several
different areas just depending on which direction I swim.
So maybe the divesite database would be "Molokini Crater" for stuff in
a certain GPS range, and I'd get that automatically just based on the
GPS info I have (either from the subsurface phone app tracking, or
from a dive computer like the Garmin that has gps).
But then I might edit it to say "Enenu'i" or "Reef's End" or
"Aquarium" depending on which part of Molokini I was diving (ok, so
the GPS might be able to separate Enenu'i from Reef's End, but when
moored at the Reef's end site, you do tend to go off in different
directions and the "sites" have different names).
So I think it would be much nicer if we just made the dive location be
per-dive, and stopped associating dives with "sites" entirely. Having
some nice way to get to a site based on "this is close to your dive"
would be great, but I think it shouldn't be tied together the way it
is now.
Then, if we had a separate dive site database, and you *don't* have
GPS location, you could just select a site when you edit the dive, and
that would *copy* the gps information from the site database to the
dive, but it wouldn't make that hard link (again, you might then edit
the per-dive data, maybe by just moving the marker around - without
that having any effect what-so-ever on the divesite database).
The problem, of course, is that it does require that dive site
database editor. Which we've never had. Because we mixed up the dive
location editing with the divesite database.
But separating out the divesite database would be good for another
reason: if we ever were to have some external "cloud database" of dive
sites that people can share, it obviously needs to be separate from
peoples dives anyway.
I think we could easily do the separation part, but the difficult part
is doing that divesite editor (even if it is entirely private, the
"cloud database" is just a pipedream right now, and has been for
years)
Linus
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