Re: release?

[Fred Wright]

On Wed, 30 Nov 2022, Gary E. Miller wrote:

> The AIS regression is fixed, and any AIS test failure will now cause
> "scons check" to fail.
>
> Are there any outstadning regressions?
>
> There are a few small feature requests pensing::
>    update RMC psuedonmea to version 4.10
>    add depth to gpxlogger
>
> I also need to:
>    go over the GitLab issues
>    check pycodestyle, Codacy and Covertiy for warnings.
>
> Anything else on the short list to a gpsd release?

There was a regression prior to the last release that was missed.  In 
prerelease testing, I saw some effectively empty SKY reports go by, but 
didn't look more closely since I was chasing something else.  I negelected 
to test xgps at the time, but later noticed that it had become very 
"flashy" (and not in a good way).  Looking right now, I don't see that 
behavior, though I'm not sure why; it could well be timing-related.

The offending SKY reports seem to be reporting DOP values without 
reporting any satellites.  Since DOP values are determined solely by 
satellite geometry, this seems to be pretty pointless, and the effect, in 
at least some cases, is that the client clears its satellite list in 
response to the empty report, and then repopulates it when it receives the 
real report, but resulting in an intermittent view.  Sometimes the duty 
cycle is so low that the display is empty most of the time.

It's not even necessary to fire up a receiver to see the trouble, since 
the expectation of this behavior is now baked into the regression-test 
data.  I wrote a hack program to check for satellite-free SKY reports, and 
it appears that the culprit is commit bddd594aa:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
MacPro:gpsd fw$ git checkout bddd594aa^
A       devtools/emptysky.py
HEAD is now at 18c227906 drivers/driver_rtcm3.c: Style cleanup, remove casts, 
change sizes.
MacPro:gpsd fw$ ./devtools/emptysky.py -Qt test/daemon/*.log.chk
Totals: 212 empty of 60660 SKY lines in 5 of 162 files
MacPro:gpsd fw$ git checkout bddd594aa
A       devtools/emptysky.py
Previous HEAD position was 18c227906 drivers/driver_rtcm3.c: Style cleanup, 
remove casts, change sizes.
HEAD is now at bddd594aa DOPs: Strip invalid DOPs, don't drop so many good ones.
MacPro:gpsd fw$ ./devtools/emptysky.py -Qt test/daemon/*.log.chk
Totals: 7744 empty of 68153 SKY lines in 131 of 162 files
MacPro:gpsd fw$ git checkout master
A       devtools/emptysky.py
Previous HEAD position was bddd594aa DOPs: Strip invalid DOPs, don't drop so 
many good ones.
Switched to branch 'master'
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.
MacPro:gpsd fw$ ./devtools/emptysky.py -Qt test/daemon/*.log.chk
Totals: 8035 empty of 74855 SKY lines in 139 of 172 files
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'll push the tool shortly.

Fred Wright