[Kstars-devel] default stars catalog

[James Bowlin]

On Sun August 24 2008, Jason Harris wrote:
> On 8/24/08, Akarsh Simha <akarshsimha at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Another solution I was considering would be to have a smaller
> > version of deepstars.dat shipped along with KStars (loaded
> > dynamically), which gets replaced by the Tycho-2 deepstars.dat when
> > the user decides to download the new data file. That would be the
> > simplest thing to implement without having a negative effect on the
> > memory efficiency.
>
> That's exactly what I was thinking :)

In general, it is usually a bad idea to have two different files with 
the same name.  If we do it in this case then if someone re-installs
the KStars program, it is likely that the Tycho-2 data will get 
overwritten.  If someone has a slow Internet connection then this might
be a bad thing.

IMO, it would be better to give the two different files two different 
names and add some logic to the program so that it checks for the 
larger of the two files first and only loads the smaller file if the
larger one is not available.  Given all the data we load at start up,
the time needed to check for the existence of an extra file will not
be noticed.  OTOH, overwriting a largish data file will probably
annoy many people, even those with a fast connection.


-- 
Peace, James