Hy Murveit replied to the topic 'Scheduler Start/Stop Times' in the forum. 3 years ago

Mark,

We think alike! I have been working on something that basically addresses your request. It is composed of two parts. 

  • Being able to more easily specify the parts of your view which are obstructed
  • Making the scheduler aware of those obstructions.
The first part is complete and available in the nightlies. It itself is composed of two components. (1) the Terrain backgrounds ( indilib.org/forum/general/9035-new-featu...ckgrounds.html#68500 ) which allows you to view your obstructions on the skymap. (2) The ability to outline the obstruction in a way that the scheduler could take advantage of. See this merge request  invent.kde.org/education/kstars/-/merge_requests/263  which has already been merged into the nightly codebase.

The next part, then, would be making the scheduler aware of these constraints. I have a little code in my personal space that I've been experimenting with that does this, at least in a limited fashion so far (here's a draft merge request, not ready for submission, containing the changes for that: invent.kde.org/education/kstars/-/merge_requests/271). I've been imaging with it the past week and it seems to work and is an improvement to my workflow. 

However, the scheduler is a complex piece of code that touches all modules, has complex timing interactions with those modules, and has a history of hard-to-foresee side-effects. Therefore, the folks managing it, Eric, Wolfgang, and Jasem rightfully feel that any new scheduler features need to both be carefully vetted and tested, and also need to add to the overall automated testing of the scheduler.  My plan is to try and do this for this change in the next month or two, and then propose that these changes be merged into the general release.

If you are the type that compiles your own code, and are willing to compile and run new software, I can share my changes to you, and we can perhaps iterate on this together. But it is not ready for general testing by folks who do compile their own code.

Hy
 

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