[Xastir] Modifications for new Australian Wx Shapefiles

[Geoff Gatward]

Hi all,

I maintain the Australian WXSVR-AU server, which is the equivelent down
under of the WXSVR in the US that injects NWS alerts into the APRS-IS.
When I first developed WXSVR-AU, I intentionally made the format of the
messages generated identical to the NWS format, so that existing clients
could display the data. No official shapefiles existed, so a set was
cobbled together from various sources with exactly the same dbf structure
and naming convention as the NWS, and this has been working well for a
couple of years.

Recently however, our Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) has got with the times
and have begun standardizing their alerting mechanism to include an XML/RSS
feed, which we are now using to generate the Wx Alerts.  As part of this
change, they have also published new shapefiles.  I have been working on
the WXSVR-AU application and now have the new format strings being sent,
which although present the same data as the NWS, now contain a slightly
different format of data.
For example our WX zones here are in the format  NSW_PW001  where NSW is
the state abbreviation (and some states are 2 chars, others are 3), and PW
is the alert area type, PW = Public Weather in this case, which corresponds
to a shapefile named  gfe_public_weather.shp.

I'm not a C programmer, but I have done some hacking with the xastir source
and I have the new BOM messages displaying.
The code changes I have made for the most part duplicate portions of the
NWS logic as new BOM logic, however there is one section in  util.c  that I
have not been able to figure out how to execute conditionally, and this is
where I would like some advice.

I'm also not sure what needs to happen next to get these code changes
merged into the mainline package.

The files I have modified are:  alert.c,  db.c,  maps.c,  util.c
I have copied the get-NWSdata as get-BOMdata to grab the shapefiles from
BOM, and created the corresponding dbfawk files.
These are all in a tarball that can be grabbed from
http://www.gatwards.org/dumpsite/xjg-xastir.tar
The format of the BOM message strings can be found at
http://wxsvr.aprs.net.au/protocol-new.html


Would someone like to take a look at these (I have commented my code) and
clean up any of the code that needs it and merge into the main release, or
let me know what needs to be done??

Thanks,
Geoff   VK2XJG / VK8GG