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Minor updates 2020-06-28

   The XTide, Congen, libtcd, and tideEditor packages have all been
   touched to perform some minor but messy maintenance.  Build scripts
   that were specific to particular flavors of Linux and to non-Unix
   platforms were moved into a new separate package, FunkyBuilds;
   configure scripts were patched to improve portability; old URLs were
   updated, and documentation nits were fixed.  XTide got a bugfix
   increment because some of the outdated URLs were in the source code;
   the other three packages are just re-releases.

   FunkyBuilds includes a new build script for Ubuntu and an improved one
   for DOS.  A new DOS binary has been posted under Contrib.

   All available from [3]https://flaterco.com/xtide/files.html.

Data refresh 2019-12-29

   Data refresh available from
   [4]https://flaterco.com/xtide/files.html#harmonicsfiles.

   A corresponding update of the harmonic constants management package is
   available from [5]https://flaterco.com/xtide/files.html#experts.

New currents for Salish Sea / Puget Sound (2019-06-20)

   Updated harmonics available from
   [6]https://flaterco.com/xtide/files.html#harmonicsfiles include new
   Salish Sea / Puget Sound currents that were obtained from NOAA by
   Charles Douglass.  All other data are untouched from 2018-12-27.

End of maintenance for non-free data

   For [7]various reasons, I have ended maintenance of the non-free data
   set.  Anyone interested in generating new harmonic constants from
   published data can find information and a list of data sources [8]here.

Mailing list

   There is an announce-only mailing list to which I send notices of each
   update to XTide or the harmonics data.  You can subscribe or read the
   archives at [9]http://ten.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/xtide-announce.

   Please note:  If an announcement to you gets bounced by your mail
   server, you fall off the list.  Some long-time contributors have fallen
   off because, unbeknownst to them, their ISPs subscribed to a spam
   blackholing service that blackholed all pair.com-hosted domains after
   one of them sent out spam.

To do list

   XTide
     * If libxtide is changed, consider merging some accommodations from
       XTideMac.
          + Opting out of LibPNG, RGBGraph, Settings, and codeset support.
          + Compiler was opinionated about character encoding and int
            types.
          + Configure for dirent.h, syslog.h.
     * Purge antique portability workarounds.
     * Make xttpd use https.
     * Support lookup by station ID instead of only name.
     * The XML parser should be bundled under the libxtide namespace but
       isn't.

   Major things to do in XTide 3 if life turns out not to be too short
   after all:
     * Support major and minor axes for currents; yield speed and
       direction at any time.
     * Renovate programming practices again (exceptions, checked and const
       operations, strings).
     * On exceptions:  get the application-specific error messages OUT of
       libxtide.
     * Move from Latin-1 to UTF-8 (requires libtcd revision).
     * Harmonize the globe location chooser with the way that Google Earth
       operates.  Use OpenGL of course.
     * Find a way to put an end to the infinite number of customization
       settings for graph mode, such as by dumping ALL of the data,
       metadata, and events to a single-file format that an external
       graphing app will read.
     * Support Wayland in non-X11 mode.

   harmgen

   It should be possible to [10]link directly with liboctave to avoid the
   very inefficient conversion of input data from binary to text and back
   again that currently is done.  However, this would be fixing something
   that is not broken, and is neither important nor urgent.

   libtcd

   Purge antique portability workarounds from configure.ac.  Always just
   include stdint not inttypes.

   Things to do in the next major revision, if there ever is one:
     * Purge COMPAT114 code and documentation.
     * UTF-8.
     * Add header field to flag tides versus currents.
     * Add depth field for currents.
     * Support major and minor axes for currents.
     * Get rid of internal state; fix inability to have more than one
       database open.
     * Remove gratuitous complexity in the encoding of speeds, equilibrium
       arguments, and node factors; make speeds 32-bit unsigned with no
       offset.
     * Possibly permit node factors to be specified for intervals shorter
       than 1 year and/or support apps that use libcongen to generate the
       node factors themselves.
     __________________________________________________________________

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References

   1. https://flaterco.com/xtide/changelog.html
   2. https://flaterco.com/xtide/xtide.html#contents
   3. https://flaterco.com/xtide/files.html
   4. https://flaterco.com/xtide/files.html#harmonicsfiles
   5. https://flaterco.com/xtide/files.html#experts
   6. https://flaterco.com/xtide/files.html#harmonicsfiles
   7. https://flaterco.com/xtide/faq.html#renaissance
   8. https://flaterco.com/xtide/harmonics.html#harmgen
   9. http://ten.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/xtide-announce
  10. https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/Standalone-Programs.html
  11. https://flaterco.com/xtide/changelog.html
  12. https://flaterco.com/xtide/xtide.html#contents
