[Kstars-devel] Quite a few bugs

[Jason Harris]

Hi Akarsh and kstars devs,

Akarsh contacted me a couple of weeks ago; he's interested in helping
to develop KStars.  I suggested that he get started by setting up his
KDE4 environment (which he's done), and looking for bugs in the
program.  So, please welcome Akarsh to the team!

I know we ususally tell people to file reports at bugs.kde.org when
they find a problem, but there are so many problems right now, maybe
it's more productive to just present them on the list for now.
Although, there is a risk that a bug may fall through the cracks this
way.

On 5/26/07, Akarsh Simha <akarshsimha at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. The highlighted constellation boundaries do not coincide with the
> actual boundaries when zoomed in.
Good catch, I can confirm this.  It might be a precession problem.
Also, there's a problem for constellations which contain the line RA=0
(such as Andromeda).  The highlight doesn't always get drawn when it
should in these constellations.  This is probably because points with
RA=23.xxx aren't considered enclosed by the constellation, when they
should be.

> 2. Io and Europa are not displaying correctly
Do you mean the dot is not being drawn?  I see that too.  It looks
like drawing of the dot is suppressed when the moon is further away
than Jupiter.  It's supposed to be the case that the more-distant
moons are drawn before Jupiter.

> 3. Constellation names in the object identification that pops up when
> you right click on the object shows the constellations' three letter
> abbreviations instead of the name.
This should be an easy fix; want to give it a try Akarsh?

> 4. I opened the Object Details dialog and clicked on the image to do
> an image search. After I closed the image search dialog, I got a
> segmentation fault. I have saved the Backtrace that KDE generated.
I can confirm the crash.  When I tried an image search (on M 19), it
didn't load any images in the list.

> 5. It seems like there is no display symbol for asteroids. I feel that
> the symbol for comets need to be something more meaningful.
The asteroids are supposed to be drawn with a grey point, just like
comets are drawn with a blue point.  I don't know why asteroids aren't
being drawn.  This might be another one that would be useful for you
to look at Akarsh, because you can use the comet drawing code as a
template.

I'd like to improve the way comets and asteroids are drawn, but I'm
not sure what to do.  The display of objects is supposed to be
somewhat realistic, especially with respect to the objects' angular
size.  The truth is, most comets and asteroids aren't resolved, so I
just draw them as points.  I would like to include comet tails, but I
don't have a way to predict which comets are likely to have tails, or
how long the tails should be.