On 20 Dec 2009, at 00:02, John Denker wrote: > I was also informed [off list] that the code to make > reversible ILSs usable had been "ignored" because it was > "not good enough". That is not very informative, not > very constructive. No clarification has been forthcoming > as to what makes it "not good enough".
The off-list discussion was with me, for the record, and I apologise to John for being a bit glib, and then unresponsive - the last Saturday evening before Christmas, is not the ideal time to be discussing such things. What I should have said is, I don't think John's patch is a reasonable fix to the problem. Or rather, it fixes the major issue from John's perspective, which is un-flyable missed segments, but replaces it with another problem which I consider to be equally bad. (I would guess John will consider that my issue is less serious than the one he is trying to fix, but that's where we differ, I think). Anyway, my objection is that delegating the active runway to a user property (or menu item) is abdicating a hard problem to the user, instead of actually figuring out a 'good' solution. (Hence my glib 'not good enough' remark) It makes sense in a live ATC context, or some other situations (eg an instructor station), but for most users it's a confusing setting. For better or worse, MSFS and X-Plane do *not* require such a piece of user interaction, and therefore it is my position that we should not either. Clearly they have a better heuristic than we do - what I would like is for someone to propose a better heuristic. (My personal guess is that the heuristic will be based on local surface winds, but who knows, as ever I am not a pilot) Aka 'figure out what the user wanted, and do it'. I know John alluded to ESP, but I regard that as abdication - we simply need to try / think harder about a workable heuristic, instead of abandoning the idea in favour of a setting. It could be argued that John's patch is an interim step (with the heuristic being developed afterwards), and should be committed as is, but personally I don't think that's the case, and hence I do not wish to be the person who commits it to CVS - as I said off list, I'm only going to commit other people's code to CVS if I can positively convince myself that I agree with the design and code - any other stance would be untenable, really. Regards, James ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
