Code review comment for lp:~stellarium/stellarium/ip-query-location

Dear Fabien,

thanks for your friendly words.

I know "IP query" is very technical. But what to write on a 6-letter
button? Else, the button must stretch over the whole window, I did not
want to make it too intrusive. If there is space, it should be
"approximate location", my own query is about 50km off... But it's still
quite a good start.

A default IP lookup for new installs seems fine, as long as there remains
a fallback location in case someone travels to his offline PC with an USB
stick with the latest version. (When I traveled to Namibia for some
astrophotos with a Stellarium-guided telescope, my Atom netbook was also
definitely offline...)

Having the always-auto-lookup-at-start feature is OK. But It must be
possible to set and keep a home position as well, even if we are online at
startup. (And if somebody in Paris is happy with startup location, he will
be surprised to find his place renamed to IPxxxx :-)

The other changes are with finding a location near map-click point and
with the country/planet comboboxes. I think they are much more functional
now. What may still be done is to deactivate and empty the country box if
we are not on Earth.

My short slot of time is unfortunately over for this weekend. So, if you
like it, please merge and feel free to tweak these small details.

I just tried your brother's no-bit-field branch. It compiles on my Atom
450 netbook (MSVC2012/Angle; takes ages...), but the shader programs are
too long. I cannot find any info on how to programmatically check shader
support from the GPU: is Angle limited to pixelshader2, vertexshader2 and
fails on every system, or would it compile ps_3, vs_3 if the graphics card
supports this? Going for Angle was the hope to support simpler/older
hardware, so if there would be a way to support ps_2+vs_2 hardware like
Atom or older Radeon or Intel GMA by utilizing simpler shader programs
(e.g. no ring shadows, normal maps, etc.?) after some tests, there would
be less users having to use super-slow MESA. (But I'm happy at least MESA
is a stable fallback...)

What I still don't know is why my both NVidias on WinXP fail. Both should
support OpenGL3.3.

Kind regards,
Georg

On Sa, 26.07.2014, 18:24, Fabien Chéreau wrote:
> Hi Georg,
>
> now that I'm back from holidays, I could acutally try the code, and I have
> some more general comments about your (very very good!) work:
>
> - we should rename "IP Query" to something less technical, like "Get
> location from Network"
>
> - I think the IP location is such an improvement that it should be the
> default for all new install, and also probably used by default for
> installs
> where the location was never set (set to Paris). This would imply that we
> transform at startup all older config.ini from location = Paris, France to
> location = auto. And use this "auto" value to trigger IP Lookup instead of
> adding a new "init_location/use_ip_geolocation_if_available" key.
>
> - Also when the lookup is successful, we could save the last know location
> into an "init_location/last_resort_location" for the next time we start
> without network.
>
> Sorry to give these feedbacks so late, I hope they make sense, what do you
> think? In any case, I think the lack of auto location feature was the most
> annoying problem of Stellarium for an average user living in US, so thanks
> a lot again!
>
> Fabien
>