[Marble-devel] [kde-edu]: Added support for MGRS

[Torsten Rahn]

Hello Carl,

Support for MGRS/UTM is certainly one of the features we'd love to see in 
Marble. As such your patch submission looks like a great step towards having 
this support and I feel quite excited about this. 

Judging from my first impression there are a few things that need to get sorted 
out:

A) There doesn't seem to be a license for your library (Or I missed it).

This needs to be addressed somehow. Ideally (for Marble) you'd choose 
something that is compatible (like BSD or LGPL2+)

B) From what I see the library contains only very few files. One of the 
important goals for our Marble library is that ideally we don't want to have 
dependencies on other libraries except for Qt. This is especially valid for 
functionality that we regard essential (and I think that UTM and MGRS support 
are quite essential for many reasons). The reason is of course that we want to 
make it easy for people to build and port Marble and keep it cross plattform. 
:-) I know so much GIS frameworks and applications which rely on several 
obscure libraries which each have their own build system / plattform 
limitations etc. that it's not funny. I don't want to introduce this problem 
in Marble. 

From what I see the libmgrs only contains less than a dozen .c/.h file. 
So the question is whether we can move/copy the source code to some place 
below marble/src/lib.

C) Not so much a problem but: The library is C code. Marble uses C++ 
throughout the library.
I wonder whether we/you can create some nice namespace or even a class that 
holds these methods.

> What I'm currently working on (pointers/help appreciated):
>   - Choosing MGRS notation form the settings panel
>   - Regex 5 for the fromString-function

Sounds awesome. Choosing MGRS notation from the settings panel should be 
trivial to add: You need to adjust the .ui file.
Are you using the Qt-Only or KDE version of Marble? There could be a difference 
regarding settings handling: You probably also need to adjust settings saving 
and loading for the marble_part and/or the QtMainWindow class (for the Qt-Only 
case also in your application).
The Regex 5 support for the fromString function might be a bit tricky indeed 
(and in fact the current fromString method certainly has its limits).

Another bullet point that is missing on your list and that I'd love to see:

* Support for UTM and MGRS in the Graticule plugin (that is the coordinate 
grid). I'd like to be able to see a visualization of the coordinate system:

See marble/src/plugins/render/graticule/GraticulePlugin.cpp

If you feel like it you can join us on #kde-edu or #marble-devel (I will be 
away during this evening though).

Best Regards,
Torsten


Am Donnerstag 23 Juli 2009 10:46:43 schrieb Gleisner Carl:
> as part of our project (MilOS) I've added support for MGRS notation of
> coordinates in Marble. MGRS is the <a
> href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system
> ">Military Grid Reference System (Wikipedia)</a>.
>
> You can download my MGRS-lib which is based on the National Geospatial-
> Intelligence Agency's <a href="http://earth-info.nga.mil/GandG/
> geotrans/"> GEOTRANS</a>. It compiles on FreeBSD 7.2 with GNU Make
> (working on portability). The makefile is probably sloppy but life is
> just one big tutorial right?
>
> The library lives here <a
> href="http://carl-johansson.com/milos/libmgrs.tar.gz ">libmgrs.tar.gz</a>
>
> And the patch lives here <a
> href="http://carl-johansson.com/milos/mgrs.patch ">mgrs.patch</a>
>
> What I'm currently working on (pointers/help appreciated):
>   - Choosing MGRS notation form the settings panel
>   - Regex 5 for the fromString-function
>
> Though somebody probably knows how to to this properly.
>
> This is all good for our project _but_ also gives the added advantage
> of UTM notation (something that Google Earth has but Marble doesn't).
>
>
> I hope you like it!
> Carl Gleisner
>
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