plan to elevation transition time

[Wookey]

+++ Andy Waddington [06-01-18 10:32 +0000]:
> On Monday 2006-01-16 13:29, Wookey wrote:
> > Aven ... 1.0.39 ...
> 
> I just thought to check which version of aven I had on one of my machines.
> I note that man aven says
> 
> aven [options] .3d file
> 
> but the man page doesn't mention any options I might use - only the
> controls for when it is running.
> 
> None of
> 
> aven -h
> aven --help
> aven -v
> aven --version
> 
> produce anything useful - just the
> 
> Gtk-warning **: cannot open display:
> 
> message.
> 
> It ought to be possible to get some usage info for the program without
> needing to be running X 

It would be nice, but currently aven does indeed not do anything without X.

> - since the man page installed with it doesn't
> tell you the version, at least the -v (--version) and -h (--help) options
> should be implemented such that they function at the command line.

I don't think it even has these options currently. I'm not entirely
convinced that an X-only program needs to be able to tell you its version
without X present, although it would occaisionally be useful. 

> Alternatively, the man page should state that the program will not
> produce anything useful except in a windowing environment and tell
> you the version number of the program to which it relates.

If you have debian then the version is easy to find a multitude of other
textual ways. dpkg -s survex-aven for example. Having the version in the
manpage is only a win if it is automated so that it doesn't get left behind
and thus simply be wrong. I'm sure that could be done (patches welcome :-)

> [SSH-ing into the machine with this copy of aven from one running
> X enables me to determine that the version I am looking at is 1.1.6,
> but I'm guessing the same comments apply to 1.0.xx versions, too.]
> 
> This version takes about three seconds to make the transition from
> plan to elevation on a small .3d file (a wire frame kayak, as it
> happens:-), that's running on a 333MHz UltraSparcII box (Sun Ultra10),
> X forwarding via a 100Mb/s ethernet to a display on a 1.8 GHz AMD64
> machine ... That seems like a good set of ways to slow the process
> down, so I would think that the performance here is better than you
> are observing with 1.0.39

The transistion time should be largely machine-performance independent. Or
at least it was on xcaverot. It looked how long it was taking to draw frames
and if it was too slow just jumped straight to the other view. Maybe aven
isn't doing this. It certainly too slow. I think 1-2 seconds is about right,
3 is probably acceptable.  

Wookey
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