We got a github issue today from someone outside the US who points out that our default map, the ancient APRSDOS format "worldhi.map," is embarrassingly obsolete, showing countries that haven't existed in decades (like, say, the USSR, Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany)...).
We display that ancient map by default because it's the absolute lowest common denominator, displayable by an absolute minimum build of Xastir (no Image/GraphicsMagick (meaning no jpg or png maps), no curl (no online maps), no shapelib (no shapefile vector maps), no dbfawk or pcre (no fancy shapefile rendering unless hard-coded), no XPM (not even cheesey X pixmap images), and no GeoTIFF (no georeferenced image maps like USGS topos or others like that). For a very long time (since 2006) Xastir has basically defaulted to building with shapelib unless you specifically asked for it. We initially made that happen by having a copy of shapelib sources in Xastir's source tree, but we removed that recently (because it was ancient and was starting to be so stale that it is better if people just use their system-provided shapelib, and basically every OS now has it in package management systems anyway). Now it's an optional third party library, but is always used if it is found and you don't ask to exclude it. I'm taking a quick survey to see if anyone would have any heartache if we made shapelib a *required* third party library instead of optional, and finding a default base shapefile map that isn't in an obsolete APRSDOS map format *and* embarrassingly outdated. It would have to be a fairly simple and small shapefile, not street-level detail for the whole world (or even a part of it) --- just continent and current (2019ish) national boundaries. So here's the survey: - If Xastir stopped letting you turn off shapefile support, and required it just like we require Motif and X11, would you be beside yourself with rage? - If, as is called for in bug #128, https://github.com/Xastir/Xastir/issues/128, we also made PCRE a mandatory third party library and made DBFAWK support (which is the only thing that uses PCRE in Xastir) unconditional, would you revolt? This is pretty much necessary anymore, because the alternative, hard-coded shapefile rendering, hasn't been maintained in years and most of the shapefiles for which there is some hard coding are almost as ancient and useless as worldhi.map. We plan to remove that option for the next release. - Do you have any favorite world shapefile maps that might be suitable as a world-wide default map that is shown when Xastir starts for the first time (until told otherwise), to be included (and maintained) in the Xastir source tree and always installed? Licensing matters here. I found some good ones, but while they were free, they were not licensed in a way that is consistent with distributing with a GPL code. I found one or two that were licensed in a way we can use, but they're part of enormous sets that would have to be separated appropriately. The one that seems to have the most promise to me is mentioned in the bug report for this issue, https://github.com/Xastir/Xastir/issues/152 -- Tom Russo KM5VY Tijeras, NM echo "prpv_a'rfg_cnf_har_cvcr" | sed -e 's/_/ /g' | tr [a-m][n-z] [n-z][a-m] _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list Xastir@lists.xastir.org http://xastir.org/mailman/listinfo/xastir