dive site handling

[Dirk Hohndel]

> On Feb 23, 2019, at 1:21 AM, Willem Ferguson <willemferguson at zoology.up.ac.za> wrote:
>> 
>>> One Subsurface question for you. I looked and saw that there have been requests to be able to access an online list of dive sites so you don’t have to recreate a dive site (with GPS coordinates) for multiple divers that were together. This would have been handy for us since all three of us are logging our dives in Subsurface. Is there ongoing work to develop the ability to pick a site from an online database? Is that something I can help develop?
>> 
> There are some important things with respect to dive sites. Maybe some of this is perfectly evident to most of you, so I may be wasting my breath.
> 1) I have never been convinced that writing the dive locations into the dive log XML is the best solution. The dive sites are currently managed in a totally separate subsystem of functions, compared to actual dive management. There is probably no reason to keep the dive site info within the dive log. One of the downsides of the current handling is that redundant dive sites often remain in the database.
> 

I think one of the strengths of what we are doing is that you can just give someone an XML file and it contains all the information that you need to look at those dives, including the dive sites.
I wonder why you think it would be better NOT to include that information in the XML (and the git repo, which frankly is becoming the primary format for most of our users, if I compare download numbers with the number of accounts for our cloud storage).
Unreferenced dive sites should not be stored when saving data. But the user can of course create multiple, redundant dive sites when doing multiple dives at the same site.

> 2) One should be able to do dive site management when there is no Internet access. This means that Subsurface should have a local copy of all dive sites used in the dive log on that computer. I think the current way of using hashes of dive sites in the local XML divelog is pretty efficient.The retrieval of dive sites from an Internet-based source would also need to be reasonably fast.
> 

We can do that today - I don't see this changing. The proposal (as I understand it) is to be able to download data from a dive site directory (there are a couple of those) and add it to a dive site that is still maintained within Subsurface and therefore available offline.

> 3) If there is a local database of dive sites on my computer, does this get backed up on the cloud in the same way as the dive log? What would the recovery options be if I lost my local dive site data?
> 

See my answer to (1) above. I have no plans to separate this out into two data files. I still think this all should be handled in one data file.

> 3) I have on occasion used Internet-based information about dive sites, but these databases never included my dive sites and therefore has not been very useful. This may be because I prefer to have the coordinates of the actual dive site within the broader reef, accurate to maybe 50m. I mostly get coordinates by taking a GPS in a sealed container and which logs coordinates every 2 minutes from which it is rudimentary to recover the appropriate coordinates.
> 

I was at first excited about the online dive site databases - you may remember that I tried to go down this path before a few years ago. But I then ended up with the same issue you seem to be referring to. For my preferences, most of the sites I cared about either weren't there or their location wasn't close to where I had located them with my phone... so this didn't provide a ton of value for me. But since others have asked about this repeatedly over the years, it appears that there is a group of users who find sufficient information in those sources. And it may be that this all depends on where you dive. Maybe there are dive locations where there is excellent information available online and I just haven't happened to be at one of those places.

> 4) There is also the possibility of showing dive site coordinates and other textual descriptive details for that site when clicking on the Subsurface map.
> 

Can you say more what you mean by that?

> I would love to hear the opinion of divers (such as Henrik) who use dive site databases more extensively.
> 

Me, too. That's why I posted this to the mailing list. Of course, my first post included Henrik's proposal from years ago, so I think we can assume he agrees with that rough direction :-)

Thanks

/D
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