KStars v3.5.0 Release Date?

[Hy Murveit]

Some good news.

Tonight, for the first time, I was able to start up the latest (built from
latest source as of an hour before I wrote this) KStars and StellarSolver
on my RPi4, without issues (so far).
I've polar aligned, plate solved, focused, guiding, ... and so far all
good. I have never been able to get to this point with this new software,
so there's definitely been progress.

Still need to bang on it for several nights, I'm sure, but thanks for the
hard work!

FWIW, I am not using any of the safeguards I was asked to put in (e.g. I
have "Use Scale" and "Load All Indexes In Memory" both checked).

Hy

On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 12:35 PM Hy Murveit <murveit at gmail.com> wrote:

> Rob,
>
> Thanks for your hard work on this!
>
> As we discussed privately, I have been unable to get plate-solving to work
> with the internal StellarSolver on my RPi4.
> Do you think this is unique to me--that is, have others been able to do
> so? If this a general problem, then I think Oct 22 is too aggressive a
> release target, as we should give our advanced users at least a few weeks
> of using the software more-or-less successfully on their target
> environments. If this is something specific to me, but others are
> successfully plate-solving on RPi's, then perhaps I'm over-reacting.
>
> FWIW, I just tried to send the full bug report I sent you out to this
> devel list, but it got blocked (I guess one of my screenshots was too
> large).
> Hopefully the moderator will accept my thread soon, and it will be
> available to all.
>
> Until that happens, where should we post bugs related to  3.5.0? This
> thread? New threads on kstars-devel?
>
> Again, I want to emphasize that this is a huge undertaking and I
> really appreciate the effort,
> Hy
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 5:47 AM Robert Lancaster <rlancaste at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>
>
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