[Xastir] Archaic default map

[Tom Russo]

We got a github issue today from someone outside the US who points out that
our default map, the ancient APRSDOS format "worldhi.map," is embarrassingly
obsolete, showing countries that haven't existed in decades (like, say,
the USSR, Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany)...).

We display that ancient map by default because it's the absolute lowest common
denominator, displayable by an absolute minimum build of Xastir (no 
Image/GraphicsMagick (meaning no jpg or png maps), no curl (no online maps),
no shapelib (no shapefile vector maps), no dbfawk or pcre (no fancy shapefile
rendering unless hard-coded), no XPM (not even cheesey X pixmap images), and
no GeoTIFF (no georeferenced image maps like USGS topos or others like that).

For a very long time (since 2006) Xastir has basically defaulted to building
with shapelib unless you specifically asked for it.  We initially made that
happen by having a copy of shapelib sources in Xastir's source tree, but we
removed that recently (because it was ancient and was starting to be so stale
that it is better if people just use their system-provided shapelib, and 
basically every OS now has it in package management systems anyway).  Now
it's an optional third party library, but is always used if it is found and 
you don't ask to exclude it.

I'm taking a quick survey to see if anyone would have any heartache if we
made shapelib a *required* third party library instead of optional, and finding
a default base shapefile map that isn't in an obsolete APRSDOS map format 
*and* embarrassingly outdated.  It would have to be a fairly simple and
small shapefile, not street-level detail for the whole world (or even a part
of it) --- just continent and current (2019ish) national boundaries.


So here's the survey:

  - If Xastir stopped letting you turn off shapefile support, and required
    it just like we require Motif and X11, would you be beside yourself with
    rage?

  - If, as is called for in bug #128, 
    https://github.com/Xastir/Xastir/issues/128, we also made PCRE 
    a mandatory third party library and made DBFAWK support (which 
    is the only thing that uses PCRE in Xastir) unconditional,
    would you revolt?  This is pretty much necessary anymore, because
    the alternative, hard-coded shapefile rendering, hasn't been maintained
    in years and most of the shapefiles for which there is some hard coding
    are almost as ancient and useless as worldhi.map.  We plan to remove
    that option for the next release.

  - Do you have any favorite world shapefile maps that might be suitable 
    as a world-wide default map that is shown when Xastir starts for the
    first time (until told otherwise), to be included (and maintained) in 
    the Xastir source tree and always installed?
   
    Licensing matters here.  I found some good ones, but while they were free,
    they were not licensed in a way that is consistent with distributing with
    a GPL code.  I found one or two that were licensed in a way we can
    use, but they're part of enormous sets that would have to be separated
    appropriately.  The one that seems to have the most promise to me
    is mentioned in the bug report for this issue, 
    https://github.com/Xastir/Xastir/issues/152

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY
Tijeras, NM  

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