Re: ✘gpsd release coming

[Fred Wright]

On Mon, 3 Aug 2020, Gary E. Miller wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Aug 2020 14:14:27 -0700 (PDT)
> Fred Wright <fw@fwright.net> wrote:
>
> > You must not have looked very closely at the xgps output if you think
> > it's OK.  You should see several pulsating values in the data box due
> > to its seeing mixed NMEA/binary in "binary" mode.
>
> Nothing new there.  gpsd has always done that.  Even with pur NMEA or pure
> binary.  Not gonna get fixed this cycle.

This *particular* case of blinking data, which is in the actual 
coordinates, did not misbehave in 3.20.  Part of the problem is that 
receipt of NMEA data with those items missing sets them to "n/a" instead 
of leaving them alone.  But it didn't matter when binary mode meant binary 
mode.

> If you don't like it, set your receiver to a better sentence mix.

Are you going to write up a doc with instructions on how to reconfigure 
receivers to work no worse than they did in 3.20?

> > Similar behavior can be seen in cgps, and gpsmon is crazier.
>
> gpsmon is crazy, no matter what.

I use it all the time.

> > I already reported this a while back in the "NEO-M8N NMEA" thread.  I
> > have a series of commits that fix it, but I need to do more testing.
> > It is, notably, a regression since 3.20.
>
> A compromise to fix other problems in 3.20.

Which you have yet to elaborate on.

> > Unrelated to all that, with Python 2, the current code to find
> > libgpsdpacket fails on almost all platforms (including Linux).
>
> Works for me on Gentoo and macOS.  Plus on all of the CI jobs.

It turns out that the issue isn't Python 2 - it's SSH.  Your library 
finder doesn't work when the command is executed over SSH.

E.g, on Fedora 25:

[fw@MacFed gpsd]$ /usr/local/bin/gpscat -V
gpscat: Version 3.20.1~dev
[fw@MacFed gpsd]$ ssh localhost /usr/local/bin/gpscat -V
fw@localhost's password:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/gpscat", line 24, in <module>
    import gps.packet as sniffer
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gps/packet.py", line 135, 
in <module>
    _packet = importado()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gps/packet.py", line 131, 
in importado
    raise OSError("Can't find packet library")
OSError: Can't find packet library

Usually that sort of problem is due to some environment variable not being 
set up in the SSH case, but I don't see any obvious candidates.

Of course my version works just fine. :-)

Fred Wright