[Xastir-dev] Weather Alert Test Cases Fail

[Dan Srebnick]

I now know why the test cases fail!

There was a "temporary change" made in 2009 that altered Xastir from
the standard for counties/zones in order to accommodate viewing of
compressed-zone format alerts sent by Pete Loveall, AE5PL's server.

Backing out what appears to have been changed in alert.c and
recompiling now allows Xastir to work according to the spec and the
test cases succeed.

So is the temporary change necessary any more?  I am generating my own
alerts according to the standard and not do use AE5PL's feed.  So I
would prefer adhering to the standard.  I've spent a couple dozen hours
trying to sort through this because documentation, standards, and
reality did not align!

Comments, thoughts please?

On Wed, 2017-08-23 at 10:01 -0400, Dan Srebnick wrote:
> This is a followup to my prior post on Xastir Weather Alerts.
> 
> There seems to have been an undocumented change in practice in how
> counties and zones or counties are identified in alerts.  The
> comments
> in Xastir alert.c state that:
> 
> // the first 2 letters are the state or marine zone (1st field
> // in both the county and zone .dbf files) followed by an
> // underline char '_', the area type as above (C, Z, or A),
> // then a 3 digit numerical code derived from:
> 
> The test case data in NWS-TEST.log also align with this statement.
> 
> However, the uncompressed test case data FAILS under the current
> code. 
> This was tested on v2.0.9 compiled from git.
> 
> The test case data works if I edit the data to remove the underscore
> char '_' from the county/zone field.
> 
> It would be incredibly useful if this change could be clearly
> explained
> by someone knowledgeable so that the comments and test cases could be
> properly updated.  I have spent many hours trying to understand what
> is
> happening.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> 73,
> 
> Dan K2DLS
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