Re: Stellarium 0.12.4 legacy
On 11/08/14 10:58, Оlе Ѕtrеісhеr wrote:
> Hi Thomasz,
Hi Ole,
I CC Alexander who is probably interested in this.
>
> Tomasz Buchert <tomasz.buchert@inria.fr> writes:
> > one of the stellarium developers asked me if we could create
> > a legacy version of stellarium 0.12.4 (the current version
> > that is likely to be in jessie is 0.13.0 [1]).
>
> What is the status of the 0.12.4 development? Will they fix bugs in this
> release or just ask to update to the 0.13 line? Since it was an upstream
> developer who came out of this idea, he can probably do some statement
> how they handle the 0.12 line themself.
0.12.4 is End-Of-Line, but I've just asked them if they are going to support
0.12.4 in the future. Note that stellarium has low number of bugs and it
shouldn't be a big problem.
>
> > The reasons he mentions:
> > * 0.13.0 requires OpenGL 2.1+ and shaders - this maybe
> > problematic for machines older than 5-6 years or some Intel GPUs;
>
> I am not really familiar with opengl; can you make an example what is
> not supported (under Debian Linux)?
As far as I understand, it's about hardware support. Older GPUs are unable to run
stellarium 0.13.0, because they don't implement necessary features.
>
> > this version runs on Qt5 as well
> > * on the other side, 0.12.4 requires only OpenGL 1.4 without shaders;
> > this version runs on Qt4
>
> Why is qt5 vs. qt4 an issue?
Qt is not an issue as far as I can tell (and probably it shouldn't be mentioned :) ).
It seems that Qt5 requires only OpenGL 1.3
(http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt-5-on-Windows-ANGLE-and-OpenGL), but if Alexander could
confirm this for me...
>
> > The idea is to create a "legacy" package named "stellarium-legacy"
> > or "stellarium-qt4". The second name is probably prefered, because FreeBSD
> > has such a package [2] already.
>
> Naming it -qt4 makes the Qt library as the main reason to choose the 0.12
> version over the current one, which may be misleading: from your
> arguments, the opengl support would be the main reason.
You are absolutely right.
>
> > I'm looking for a healthy discussion if we want such a package in jessie,
> > and if yes, a sponsor to upload it to the archive (I will take care of general
> > maintenance).
>
> If even upstream sees the need to support older opengl versions: maybe
> they could do so in their current development? Maybe as a configuration
> option? Then, there would be only one code base, and the -legacy package
> would not be decoupled from the main development branch.
Alexander should comment on this, but I'll put forward my point of view.
As mentioned, 0.12.4 is EOL, they are not going to develop it anymore.
s-legacy would be there only to provide stellarium for older machines
that will be unable to run newer versions. It would never ever advance
its version.
It would be great if 0.13.0 could support older hardware and we would
have one stellarium package in the archive. I have no idea what development
effort it would require, but since stellarium-legacy was proposed, I guess
it may be unfeasible.
There is another solution, which I don't quite like, but must mention:
we could ship 0.12.4 instead of 0.13.0 with jessie for the purpose of
keeping support for older machines.
All that said, here is a prospective stellarium-legacy packaging repo:
http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-astro/packages/stellarium-legacy.git/
>
> Best
>
> Ole
Tomasz
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