Comment: Current GPSBabel & GeoToad

[robertlipe]

Hi, Thomas.

This isn't really the right place for this conversation, so feel free to close and or hide it as you see fit.

I came across GeoToad in a recent search hoping that someone took over RickRich's excellent geo- tools after his passing. (I failed in that search. I just wanted updates for his scripts that handled login and PQ fetching. Looks like I'll either fix those or use Selenium to handle login and other page scraping duties instead of hard-coding in labels and then back to his tools for the fetch.)

I see that GeoToad is using GPSBabel for some backend work. Groovy. I'm not sure how seriously to treat your doc, but it looks like GeoToad is actively maintained (yay!) and that the doc is old and makes some promises that GPSBabel won't keep, so I wanted to reach out with some attempts to recalibrate expectations.

Your goals of working on Windows 98 and supporting PDA formats are admirable, but I had to toss those overboard years ago. GPSBabel is drinking age and I just can't support all the old things forever while continuing to move the code forward. It's not like I'm firing up VMs for those ancient combinations and plugging in GPSes that I can't even find batteries for any longer.

Many of the OS versions and formats you mention are no longer supported in GPSBabel. It's not like there's an uprising of requests for MacOS 10.4 or Cetus. :-) In fact, I doubt anyone's noticed, but thought I'd mention it. Maybe your Ruby runs forever on backward systems. GPSBabel doesn't.

Looking around, you're doing the kind of filtering in your examples with GPSBabel that we improved a LOT in GPSBabel 10.9.0. Linux distros, of course, insist on shipping old versions and there's nothing we can do about that, but we made some algorithmics improvements that boosted speed 10, 15, 20x or more for certain filtering operations. So if you had cases that were taking hours or even many minutes, you and your users should find it much less computationally expensive to use current GPSBabel for that kind of work. (Potentially losing that valuable Windows 98 support. :-) ) Filterings Duplicates, points along a polyline, and points in/out of polygons all got major algorithmic boosts. So if you have anything using those filters that's annoyingly slow, it's worth the pull/build to get 1.9.0. It's been out for a while now with no reported issues, so I feel pretty good about it, but if you find any regressions, buzz us with test cases.

As an action item, please skim your doc for references to fossilized file formats. I think that https://www.gpsbabel.org/capabilities.html is current (it doesn't always exactly match the released version), but gpsbabel -h (or 'gpsbabel -^3' if you're scripting the files interface for a wrapper, hint hint :-) ) will always return the current list for the installed version.

All the PalmOS support, for example, is gone. So we have new formats but couldn't justify maintaining the formats that we couldn't find anyone using in many years.

Of course, feel free to close, vaporize, or restate any percentage of this "issue" that you feel appropriate.

Happy hunting!