Ampere K. Hardraade wrote:
One of the problems, as I pointed out earlier, is that the download size of
the base package is a bit on the huge size.
fully agreed, that's something most people seem to complain about - on
the other hand it's fairly "small" to be honest - if you compare it to
other simulators like MSFS, X-Plane etc. - so having a full simulator
by downloading less than 100 MB data, sounds okay to me.
On the other hand the scenery is still a whole different matter, and
my example doesn't take into account that FG's scenery is made
available separately.
Also, if you are merely updating your package and "suffering" from
a low bandwidth connection, you could still check out tardiff:
http://tardiff.sourceforge.net
Stewart & Steven have just recently created new patches for the latest
FG base package version, so it might be worth to give it a try if
downloading another 80 MB does not appeal to anybody here ;-)
Even though these patches are CHECKED before they are released you
cannot expect much support for newly encountered problems after applying
a patch, the first advice would be in most cases to install a
conventional package, in order to assure that there aren't problems
caused by the patch.
That's also something that Erik mentioned some time ago.
Including all aircrafts into an already big download will not be a good idea.
I agree again, I've just checked the size of my local aircraft folder in
$FG_ROOT/data - it's close to 170 MB, but on the other hand I could
imagine that as an aircraft designer/developer it's also quite a
motivation to have your aircraft by default in the base package,
regardless of its development status, it also assures that users can
easily try out your work and provide feedback.
So, I am not sure if it's such a good idea to simply stop packaging
unfinished aircraft.
On the other hand I am certainly not in the position to really care
about the download size ... so my opinion is not particularly valuable
in that regard ;-)
Personally, I'd hence still prefer getting everything and being able
to tell FlightGear what maturity level I require for all aircraft
minimally.
So, the best option will still
be removing all the work-in-progress aircrafts from the base package, and
keep the size of the download to a minimium.
well, if that should really turn out to be the best option, one might
very well end up having two different base packages - one for
developers, and one for end-users who merely want to have the working
stuff.
But even then, the option to classify aircraft by their development
status might come in handy
Even if it's not being used by FG directly, on the one hand one could
introduce such a <maturity></maturity> tag in order to allow scriptable
extraction of immature aircraft without FG even knowing about it.
On the other hand one could have the launcher (fgrun) display whether an
aircraft can be expected to perform flawlessly or not by looking at its
maturity tag.
In that regard one might even consider adding some kind of "remarks" tag
to the XML file to allow developers provide some general information
about their aircraft, any bugs that are existing and maybe even TODOs.
Neither of these latter two suggestions would require any direct code
changes to FG, because as far as I know the XML files aren't currently
validated anyway.
So one could simply recommend aircraft developers to maintain two
specific sections within their aircraft definition files, one being
something like
<maturity>experimental</maturity>
and the other one
<remarks>this aircraft has the following known bugs...</remarks>
Then it would be fairly straight-forward to either extract certain
aircraft from the base package by using a shell script based on the
defined development status, or alternatively one could extend
fgrun in a manner to take these tags into account so that it could
either display the said info or even offer a filter so that only
aircraft meeting a certain development status are displayed.
I haven't yet looked into the sources for fgrun, but I think it
should not be that much of an addition ?
I think such an approach would have the potential to reduce some
of the frustration and confusion that some new users encounter.
What do you think ?
----------
Boris
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