Silly problem with dive sites and GPS downloading

[Monty Taylor]

On 09/24/2018 11:33 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 24, 2018 at 9:04 AM Dirk Hohndel <dirk at 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).

Yeah - I think that's right on. It handles the simple case "I dove on 
these coordinates" Then, if you WANT to create a dive site in the dive 
site database, or in the magical future world of ponies and rainbows you 
want to associate it with a pre-existing dive site from a magical 
dive-site database, you totally can.

> 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)

I like the idea of a dive site database/editor and would be happy to 
work on such a thing.