From: [email protected]

Package: xplanet
Version: 1.1.0-1
Severity: normal

When upgrading xplanet from woody to sarge I find a warning that the
behaviour of xplanet has changed. This qualifies as a good candidate for
the understatement of the year after "editorial changes". Users should be
aware that it might take hours fixing the configuration after switching
from woody to sarge and finding their carefully designed xplanet
setup is not working any longer. Therefore I strongly suggest to
set xplanet on hold and continue using the woody version.

If you really want to upgrade to 1.x, here are some more things that have changed but are NOT covered in /usr/share/doc/xplanet/NEWS.gz:


markerfile (now config file only, see below)
1. If you're using 8bit characters, the string (e.g. "M�nchen") must be
given in utf-8 encoding now.
Solution: use iconv for conversion.
2. The "symbolsize=" option appearently now takes the number as radius of
the circle to be drawn, not diameter as it used to be. Therefore, circles
are doubled in size.
Solution: Change the markerfile (or, as in my setup, change the script that generates the markerfile) to have half the value.


--font
MUST be a ttf font now. You may use the one supplied with xplanet i.e.
"--font /usr/share/xplanet/fonts/FreeMonoBold.ttf" but don't expect the
labels to look like they used to do before.


--labelpos
1. When placing the label to the right margin (e.g. --labelpos -0+0) the
last letter is cut off in the middle.
Solution: Manual adjustment like "--labelpos -10+0"
2. Another annoyance is the time format that carries the time zone twice
e.g. "Sa 21 Aug 2004 12:09:21 CEST CEST". This happens as soon as LANG is defined to something different from C, e.g. "LANG=de_DE@euro".
Solution: "export LANG=C" before xplanet invocation.


--fuzz
This option went away declared "not currently supported". However,
"twilight" (config file only) seems to do quite the same thing.


--output
When using --output, you should be aware that xplanet now will run forever which is quite nonsense when writing to a file. Adding a "--num_times 1"
makes xplanet behave reasonable.

(to be continued)


Furthermore:
It should be emphasized again that some options cannot be used on the
command line any longer, a config file is required (e.g. -markerfile, now marker_file). Other options are NOT understood in a config file, they MUST
be given in a command line (e.g. --labelpos) although the whole concept is neither understandable nor easy to maintain.

And of course the config file cannot expand shell variables like ~ which
makes the xplanet configuration less portable than a shell script - I'm
not the user "cbiedl" on all my computers but I'd like to keep the xplanet config in sync. Big mess. Why was this done?


An example:

How I used xplanet in woody:

#!/bin/sh
xplanet \
-projection orthographic \
--cloud_image ~/.xplanet/clouds_2000.jpg \
--markers \
-markerfile ~/.xplanet/markers.txt \
-markerfile ~/.xplanet/qm.txt \
--shade 50 \
--labelpos -0-150 \
--font '-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-11-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1' \
--north Orbit \
--radius 48 --fuzz 5 \
--geometry 1024x768 \
--output ~/temp/earth.png \
-moonside \
-night_image /usr/share/xplanet/images/night.jpg \
-starfreq 1e-06


Sam^H^Himilar output when using sarge:

#!/bin/sh
export LANG=C
nice xplanet \
--config ~/.xplanet/earth.conf \
--labelpos -10-150 \
--projection orthographic \
--font FreeMonoBold.ttf \
--fontsize 11 \
--north Orbit \
--radius 48 \
--geometry 1024x768 \
--origin moon \
--output ~/temp/earth.png \
--num_times 1 \
--starfreq 1e-06

with ~/.xplanet/earth.conf:
[default]
cloud_map=/home/cbiedl/.xplanet/clouds_2000.jpg marker_file=/home/cbiedl/.xplanet/markers.txt marker_file=/home/cbiedl/.xplanet/qm.txt
shade=50
night_map=/usr/share/xplanet/images/night.jpg
twilight 5


By the way, in spite of a full path specified in night_map (same for
cloud_map) above, xplanet looks for the map in several places and picks
the first match. From the strace output:

(...)
open("night.jpg", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("xplanet/night.jpg", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("xplanet/images/night.jpg", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/home/cbiedl/.xplanet/night.jpg", O_RDONLY) = 5
close(5) = 0 open("/home/cbiedl/.xplanet/night.jpg", O_RDONLY) = 5
(...)

In other words, an accidentially existing /home/cbiedl/.xplanet/night.jpg caused xplanet to use the wrong image and generated a resize warning
message afterwards, else I'd never have noticed.


I'll stop here although no doubt more oddities can be found in a short
time.


The Debian maintainer is asked to consider reverting to xplanet 0.9 for
sarge until 1.x is usable. Alternatively a migration script that can be
invoked instead of xplanet (or xplanetbg) with the old-style options
prints the new usage, including comments, warnings and a config file if
needed.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.7
Locale: LANG=de_DE@euro, LC_CTYPE=de_DE@euro

Versions of packages xplanet depends on:
ii debconf 1.4.30 Debian configuration management sy ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-13 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an ii libfreetype6 2.1.7-2.2 FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib ii libgcc1 1:3.4.1-4sarge1 GCC support library
ii libglib2.0-0 2.4.5-2 The GLib library of C routines
ii libjpeg62 6b-9 The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG ii libnetpbm10 2:10.0-4 Shared libraries for netpbm
ii libpango1.0-0 1.4.1-1 Layout and rendering of internatio ii libpng12-0 1.2.5.0-7 PNG library - runtime
ii libstdc++5 1:3.3.4-6sarge1 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii libtiff3g 3.6.1-1 Tag Image File Format library
ii libungif4g 4.1.3-1 shared library for GIF images (run ii libx11-6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-4 X Window System protocol client li ii libxext6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-4 X Window System miscellaneous exte

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