FoxtrotGPS 0.99.4 available (also: looking forward...)

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Hello all,

I'm pleased to announce the release of FoxtrotGPS 0.99.4,
now available for download from <http://www.foxtrotgps.org/>.
Please download it, build it, package it, use it, hack on it--
enjoy it!


Marcus, if you're listening: we've made a number of improvements that
I'm sure the users of tangoGPS would appreciate you incorporating--
the most salient ones are listed in the attached NEWS file.

As far as I understand the goals of tangoGPS, the vast majority of
improvements that have been made thus far in FoxtrotGPS should also be
a fit for tangoGPS; even features like zoom-decoupling/detail-scaling,
perhaps--since the GUI has been completely recreated in GladeXML and
any undesired controls, including menu-items, are now trivial to find
and mark as `not visible'.

There are changes coming, however, that may not fit in with the
tangoGPS goals: notably a complete overhaul of the friend-finder
system and, it appears, the replacement of much of the internal
map-loading and -rendering code with calls to osm-gps-map.
Sander van Grieken has done some good work so far porting FoxtrotGPS
to use the osm-gps-map 0.6 API (which I've started reviewing and trying
to fold into my own branch), and John Stowers has been very receptive
to incorporating changes that we need. Sander, I know I owe you another
couple of follow-ups regarding your changes--I appreciate your being
patient as I've sometimes taken some days to write a proper response....

If tangoGPS and FoxtrotGPS are actually to diverge markedly at this
point, then I'm rather inclined to call what follows from this 0.99.4
`beta' release `FoxtrotGPS 1.0', and call the post-divergence series
of releases (with the coming invasive changes) something like
`FoxtrotGPS 1.1'.

Everything should be functionally solid at this point, and the
application should basically be `1.0 quality'. The only obvious
`pre-1.0' issues of which I'm aware in the package as a whole is:

    * There's no user manual included.

    * Many of the existing translations are only partially done.

I have spent time `shaking bugs out' of both the original code that we
inherited as well as the logic and GladeXML that I and others have added,
and presumably some of the more daring souls out there have been doing
the same with builds that they've made from their own Bazaar branches;
hopefully having an actual release will open things up to a wider audience.

Ideally, I'd like to see some packagers from the distributions pick this up
and run with it--SHR, Debian, Ubuntu, et al.... If you need help, or have
additional requirements that we're not yet meeting--let us know.

To get the OE-based distros started, I've attached a set of bitbake
recipe-files after the NEWS file :)

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."

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