KStars v3.5.0 Release Date?

[Robert Lancaster]

Hey guys, 

I also agree 100%, we are not ready by Oct. 15th.  There are still several loose ends that need to be tied up on my end, as well as writing up documentation for how to use StellarSolver.  Since it is a major release of KStars (3.5.0 vs 4.4.4), I think major changes in the UI and the functions are perfectly fine, but I agree we don’t want to change everything on the user without warning, so we need time to write up documentation and make sure everything is clear and simple for the user to use.  So please let me know what is confusing so that we can try to improve that.  As for your suggestion that we allow the old code to work during a transition period, the issue with that is that the old code is not compatible really.  But that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t make the UI in the Align module *LOOK* like it used to with the combo boxes in align.  I put the options for which source extraction method, which solving method, and which profile to use inside the Options dialog because I thought people would access them less often than the other settings in the align module and I also want those to be available if we plate solve in other places in KStars.  But we could also put those same options at the bottom in the align module as well, which would make it look close to what it used to look like.  There is no reason they couldn’t be in both places.  It might lead to a better transition.

On that note I also agree that we weren’t really ready to put all this in KStars master right away, especially because people rely on the master branch of the repo for nightly builds, and we needed to test it thoroughly before integrating it.  I was hoping for more of a testing time period where people could test this on my fork or maybe in a different branch in the main repo and we could have a nice discussion about how to improve it before putting it in the official KStars Master repo.  But, let's not be too hard on Jasem for that, he is a great guy and works incredibly hard to support KStars and INDI and us.   It has caused a little more pressure on me to fix all these problems and get it all integrated, and maybe that was a good thing, because I had mostly finished StellarSolver back in June, and I was not integrating it into KStars very fast at all.  This has pretty much lit a fire under me to get it done.  We already did complain to him about putting it in the main repo so quickly, but it really has worked to get things up and running.  So instead of focusing on that, now that its done, let's work really hard to polish everything up and get it ready for release.  I think we could be on track for a Oct 22nd release.  Please keep testing and I will keep trying to perfect things with StellarSolver and its integration with KStars for the release.  And I am sorry if the integration has caused anybody any issues because it wasn’t ready yet.

Thank you very much,

Rob