[FOSS-GPS] More upcoming FoxtrotGPS releases, and...

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Hi all,

I'm planning another FoxtrotGPS release shortly--hopefully this weekend;
to be included as changes since the last (0.99.4) release are only minor
changes--mostly the incorporation of a bunch of fixes and some contrib
scripts that Daniel Baumann has been carrying in Debian for a while,
but also a fix for the `no straightforward way to un-load a track'
issue (a small change merged from the latest tangoGPS codebase), and
a fix for one issue that cropped up while I was trying to give someone
a demo of what was supposed to be `1.0-quality code': if you've ever
noticed that none of the map-tiles are shown until *all*
of the map-tiles finish downloading, that should be fixed now.

Sadly, we've still yet to receive any kind of feedback from our
sister project, tangoGPS, and Marcus (tangoGPS' maintainer) has
released one revision since our original branchpoint that includes
some changes that I don't believe we should incorporate at this time;
though *most* of his most recent changes *are* things that we *do*
clearly want, I'm not comfortable including the latest `live logging'
additions; so it looks as though we've reached a point where we can't
quite be a strict functional superset of tango (i.e.: `tangoGPS plus')
like we have been so far.

So I'm going to call this release `FoxtrotGPS 1.0' to mark the point
where the two projects have started diverging, since I believe that
the FoxtrotGPS mainline codebase is, at this point, basically a
`1.0-quality tangoGPS'.

Following that, I'll merge the HxM heartrate-monitor support from tango
(which is a more substantial change) and hopefully get the first `1.1 series'
release (1.1.0) out some time in the next week.

One small thing that I'd like to see happen in the 1.1 series is that
we should be able to directly output logfiles in a standard format
like GPX; there's a question I have about that, though, which arises from
the support for heartrate-monitors: what Marcus has done in tangoGPS
is to just add another column to the end of his (CSV) `.log' files,
where he records the heartrate as sampled at that point. There's
no such element in any version of the GPX spec, of course, so
how should we go about logging heart-rate data (or misc. data?)
if we convert to using GPX as our primary log-format?

Is there some `vital signs' XML schema for heartrate-logging that
integrate into a GPX file? Should we invent one? Or should we just
log the heartrate data into a separate file?

Any thoughts?

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