Subsurface 4.6

[Dirk Hohndel]

Hi

So the discussion a little while ago seemed to focus on two points:

a) continue the desktop app in maintenance mode
b) get the mobile apps to a reasonable state (and release the iOS version, finally)

This email is about a), I'll send a separate one about Subsurface-mobile.


We have a ton of small fixes and improvements in master. And it seems
silly to try to backport them all to the 4.5-branch. So I'm thinking it
would make more sense to clean up master and do a 4.6 release instead.

Linus and I have been using master on our last trip and I didn't really
find a lot of things that are outright broken. One big thing that is
currently not working as designed is the preferences. Tomaz promised me
yesterday that he'd be taking a look at finishing the transformation
there.

But what else is missing to get master ready for a release?

Clearly I need to document the two new features that I implemented and
never talked much about (Linus may have given me an earful about that).

(1) Subsurface master for a while now has supported multi user mode.

Admittedly in a slightly limited fashion, but for me it has worked really
well for testing.

./subsurface --user=Joe
./subsurface --user=Jane

This uses two different sets of preferences. So units can be different,
default file can be different (but careful, the default file is still
based on the system username under which you run the app, so that's the
same -- but come to think of it, that's something I really should change,
too), cloud credentials can be different. It's not perfect, but I think
it's a start.

Comments, patches welcome.

(2) Subsurface master now supports longer timeouts for cloud storage.

When in Palau, 5 seconds was usually just a little too short for a
successful connection to the cloud storage server.

./subsurface --cloud-timeout=NN

allows you to tell Subsurface how many seconds to wait for a response.
Additionally, once it times out once, it no longer tries every single time
but instead just switches into local cache only mode.


With this out of the way, here's my TODO list for 4.6, and I hope that
others will add to it with things that you are aware need fixing before we
release 4.6:

- Preferences handling: right now this is rather broken; some preferences
  aren't saved correctly at all. The "Apply" vs. "Save" in the preferences
  dialog doesn't work as expected, etc.

- Offline mode: as explained above, when the cloud server times out we now
  switch Subsurface into offline mode. I think we should allow the user to
  try to take things online again, manually, without restarting Subsurface.
  I'm planning to work on this today after sending this email.

- Mutiuser mode: change the name of the local default file if --user=NAME
  is given to NAME.ssrf

- The odd error messages when saving to cloud storage that have been
  discussed on the mailing list in the last few days. That needs to be
  traced so we know what's going wrong. Since some people reported that it
  sometimes actually saves things correctly, my guess is that the error
  handling is broken in weird ways?

- Image handling: Robert, I seem to remember that this was currently not
  in a sane state. Can you let me know where we are with this?

- Dive planner: what's the status on that? Are we good?

- Handling rebreathers: same question. Linus had some comments on that, I
  don't dive rebreathers so I simply don't know what the status is.

- Qt 5.7: we need to get rid of the dependency on WebKit. Yes, I guess we
  could manually compile it and bundle it for our binary packages, but
  people who compile from source will run into all kinds of pain. I think
  this will also cause pain for Marble (but haven't looked into this at
  all, yet).


That's the list that I'm aware of, feel free to add if there are things
that I'm missing. Right now I have no time line in mind since it's very
hard for me to guess how much time I'll have to work on this in the next
month or two, but also because some of this depends on others (notably,
Tomaz and Robert), who also had issues finding time for Subsurface,
lately.

Thanks

/D