towards Subsurface 4.9.8

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Wed Nov 4 11:58:56 PST 2020


Hi Everyone,

I'm running a bit behind my original timeline (I had hoped to be ready with this release around now), but a couple of changes really side-tracked me.

For one, the fact that the new Garmin Descent Mk2 no longer supports USB storage but only works as MTP device. Which caused me to add libmtp to all the builds which caused the whole Win64 rathole as I couldn't get libmtp to build with Win32 under MXE, which then highlighted a tooling issue in my automated macOS release builds where any time I reran the configuration (in this case, to add libmtp), HIDAPI and user space FTDI were dropped. I think I have all of this sorted, the latest binaries should once again be correctly signed, include all the libraries that should be there, etc.

The second excursion was triggered by tiny changes to the desktop UI to make it be somewhat more useable in dark mode. Which ended up with different pull requests focussed on (a) make things readable in dark mode (b) keep the pretty blue headers in the info tab (c) simplify the tab widgets header code and especially make it more consistent across all the tabs. This still isn't fully completed as now once again on macOS with the default settings the switch to dark mode gives the user a bad experience which really isn't ideal.

My plan is to chase down the missing pieces for reasonable desktop behavior today. In the process I also realized that there are some serious issues with default font sizes and the UI look overall. It's a major pain to make this look reasonable across all possible screen resolutions (with and without the various flavors of HiDPI), across three OSs and multiple desktop environments on Linux. Right now I feel that it consistently looks fairly bad to quite terrible across all the platforms. But I think I'll tackle THAT problem after the 4.9.8 release.

In the meantime I've pushed the latest strings to Transifex - I hope that there will be no more new strings prior to the release and would appreciate if the translators could work on what's now uploaded. There aren't a ton of new strings, my statistics seem to indicate that for most languages it's just a dozen strings (plus another handful that will only become important when I do the next Subsurface-mobile release -- but of course we do maintain all the strings together). Full disclosure, assuming I come up with a better solution for the dark mode issue, the one long string describing the preference settings related to the header color might change slightly.

The other thing that would REALLY help me is if people could test the latest test binaries across ALL platforms. Both 32bit and 64bit Windows. Both macOS 10.13/14 and 10.15/11.0. As many of the Linux distros as possible.

Key things I care about:
- are all the key libraries included / linked into the binary, so
-- do FTDI downloads work
-- when picking the Garmin Descent Mk2 and clearing out the "connection" text, do you get an error message that says that it can't open the MTP device
-- do HIDAPI downloads work (so that's the Suunto EON Steel/Core)
- how do things work with the default theme, or with a dark theme if that's available on your OS
- does the builtin user manual display (this will show us if QtWebKit was correctly included)
- are there any other regressions compared to 4.9.7 (or the last version that you used)

Thanks

/D


More information about the subsurface mailing list