Survex 1.4.9 released

[Olly Betts]

Survex 1.4.9 is now available:

https://survex.com/download.html

Here's the full NEWS file entry for this release:

Changes in 1.4.9 (2024-07-04):

* aven:

  + Support showing geodata overlays in Aven.  We use the GDAL library to load
    the data, so this should work for any format which GDAL supports so long as
    it can be read from the filing system and is geo-referenced vector data -
    see https://gdal.org/drivers/vector/index.html for a list.  Currently the
    dialog to select a file defaults to showing GPX, KML, GeoJSON and shape
    files - set the filter to "All Files" to chose other formats.

  + Reimplement display of cavern output.  The old version turned the log into
    HTML and displayed it using wxHtmlWindow, but that adds a lot of overhead
    and is especially inefficient if there are many diagnostics - cavern could
    finish almost instantly yet aven could take many seconds to process the
    output.  The new version renders directly from the log data.  It should
    have most of the features from before - the only missing feature I'm
    currently aware of is that you can't now select and copy text from the log
    window, which wxHtmlWindow provided for free.  If people miss this feature,
    we could add it to the new implementation.

  + (Microsoft Windows version): Clicks in the cavern log window which load
    files into an editor now protect the filename if it starts with a dash
    to prevent it being interpreted as a command line option.  We already
    do this for other platforms, but weren't on Microsoft Windows on the
    assumption that it isn't needed because the filenames will be fully
    qualified, but that may not be the case if aven if run by hand from the
    command line or from some other launcher.

* cavern:

  + Add support for processing Walls format survey data (.SRV and .WPJ files).
    This support is somewhat experimental but at a point where it seems useful
    to make it easier for people to try out.  See the manual for a list of
    known shortcomings.  Thanks to Eric C. Landgraf for a lot of testing and
    encouragement.

  + Fix bug with Compass DAT diving data.  If a survey uses the depth gauge
    then since 1.4.6 we set its style to "diving", but we weren't clearing that
    so all surveys after than in the same DAT file were also set as "diving".

  + When parsing of Compass DAT files we report errors in more cases if the
    input doesn't conform to the format we expect, rather than potentially
    quietly misinterpreting the data.

  + *entrance now suppresses "Unused fixed point" warning.  This warning is
    intended to catch typos, which is much less likely for a station named
    twice.  It's also reasonable to use only *fix and *entrance on a station at
    the entrance of an unsurveyed cave.

  + Highlight plumbed clino readings fully in diagnostics.  Now the full reading
    is highlighted instead of just the first character.

  + Report location of previous fix after "already fixed" error/warning.

  + Use "info" diagnostic category for "Originally entered here" message.  This
    is more logical as the original *begin isn't something to be warned about,
    only the reentering is.  This was only a warning before because we didn't
    used to have "info" diagnostics.

  + Use "info" diagnostic category for message about not reporting further
    uses of a deprecated feature.  Previously this was a warning, but the newer
    "info" category is more appropriate here.

  + The message about inventing a fixed point is now an "info" diagnostic which
    allows us to report a location which is where that station is defined,
    which may be useful to the user.

  + Make highlighting position in error reporting more robust.  We no longer
    try to highIight if we calculate a negative column offset, when previously
    we would print billions of spaces.  As far as I know this has never
    happened in a released version.

  + Error messages which report the program name now remove any ".exe" suffix.
    This helps the testsuite by making the expected output the same
    cross-platform, but also seems slightly nicer for users.

* dump3d:

  + The timestamp reported by DATE_NUMERIC is now printed portably.  Previously
    we were assuming that a time_t is the same size as a long int, which is not
    true on all platforms.

* manual:

  + (Microsoft Windows version): Update information about installation
    with/without admin rights.

  + Summarise support for reading CMAP data and its assumptions and
    limitations.

  + Mention Compass, Walls and CMAP support in the importing data howto
    section.

  + Drop mention of Rosetta Stal from the manual.  The referred to link from
    our website was removed in 2015 because Rosetta Stal hadn't been updated
    for 13.5 years at that point.  Now the domain it was available from has
    lapsed and is a domain squatter "for sale" page.

* img library:

  + The coordinates in CMAP data are in feet but we were dividing rather
    than multiplying by the conversion factor to get metres so all
    coordinates were about 10.76 times too large.

  + Stations in CMAP "station" variant XYZ files are now flagged as
    underground (as they always have been for "shot" variant XYZ files).

  + When reading CMAP XYZ files, we no longer emit duplicate img_LABEL for
    stations in loops.

  + A CMAP XYZ file without a survey title is now handled correctly (this was
    reporting a bogus "Out of memory" error).

  + The img.h header now defines constants IMG_VERSION_SURVEX_POS, etc for the
    values reported in the version field for non-.3d formats.

  + (Microsoft Windows version): Workaround limitation of Microsoft's C
    library so we handle dates before 1970 in Compass PLT files, CMAP XYZ
    files, and older format .3d files.  Previously these were reported
    as "unknown date".

* We now support overriding the location of support files by setting the
  SURVEXLIB environment variable.  We no longer look at the srcdir
  environment variable for this.

* (Microsoft Windows version): The installer is now created automatically
  on Github actions, which has required a few changes.  It now packages a
  64-bit build, and is created with Innosetup 6.3.2 which no longer supports
  Vista.  The installer is also now significantly larger, which is mostly
  because we now need to include a large number of DLLs, most of which are
  dependencies of the mingw64 FFmpeg and GDAL packages.

* (Microsoft Windows version): If the directory where we expect the PROJ
  support files to be does not exist for some reason we now avoid triggering
  a segmentation fault in PROJ.

* Build system:

  + The GDAL library is now required to build Survex.

  + (Microsoft Windows version): The probe for GL and GLU libraries now also
    checks for Microsoft's non-standard library names.

  + Correct configure --help output for --enable-werror for which the default
    is actually "no" rather than "maintainer-mode".

* testsuite:

  + aven.tst: Skip a testcase when running on mingw as it seems to hang there.
    We already skip this testcase on macos for what appears to be the same
    problem.

  + Fix comparison of output to work on platforms using DOS line endings.

Here are SHA256 checksums should you want to verify the integrity of the
files:

0bf33b188af4aedde969b371434ba2b68e7aa0e4d602e4318c2d121a67dfdb0e  survex-1.4.9.tar.gz
b2995a9b94196f2a1419c082fcafe20734d25c0c432dbf0bfe57f85f58423223  survex-win32-1.4.9.exe

There are also detached GPG signatures in the download directory:
https://survex.com/software/1.4.9/

There are "release notes" on the wiki, which I'll try to keep updated
with any issues found, so take a look there for the latest information:

https://trac.survex.com/wiki/ReleaseNotes/1.4.9

Please report any issues you find which are not covered in the release
notes to the bug tracker: https://trac.survex.com/

Cheers,
    Olly
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