Stellarium freezes when you go to far forward

[Keith Schacht]

I have developed a set of Stellarium lessons that my students do in science class. I have Stellarium installed on every computer in the lab and bring the students there a few times a year.

There is one bug with Stellarium which we keep running into. Once students learn how to move time forward quickly & rewind time quickly, inevitably students start speeding up time as fast as they can. When Stellarium hits the year 9999 (which only takes about 60 -120 seconds) the program freezes.

I understand this is an edge case that most people probably do not hit, but this happens to almost every student in my class at some point.

Is it possible someone could add logic to handle this edge case gracefully rather than freezing? Ideally, at some year (maybe year 9000) the program just gracefully stops time traveling and reverts to real-time.

I've replicated this on both the Mac and Windows version of the program. This bug is in the latest build (downloaded last week).

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Can you disable Satellites plugin and check again?

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Just for note: Stellarium has hardcoded limits for time between -100000 and 100000 years. Can you give me your config.ini?

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Please show also ssystem.ini file.

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Yes, this issue related to Satellites plugin.

Workaround: disable loading of the Satellites plugin at startup planetarium

[Keith Schacht (krschacht)]

Nice, I was just sitting down to test this out myself but I'm glad you guys were able to repro it.

Alex, can I be any more help on this? Would you still like me to test something or send you config files?

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

No, we found source of problem :)

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

A fix has been committed as revision 6562 of the trunk branch in Stellarium's Bazaar repository at Launchpad:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~stellarium/stellarium/trunk/revision/6562

[Keith Schacht (krschacht)]

Thanks Alex. One last quick question on this bug. Since I'm just ramping up the Stellarium dev cycle, when do you cut a branch and package it for release? It looks like this fix is slated for 0.13.0 and is already committed. I can't tell whether it's part of the latest alpha build yet (7.2) but that's marked as not ready for distribution. 'll I really need to know is when I should update all of our Stellarium installs so they include this fix. I assume I just keep an eye on the launchpad announcements for 0.13 becoming the latest release?

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

This solution of bug is not in current alpha yet. In any case alpha is not stable and we propose it for testing and hunting for bugs. For current stable version you can edit config.ini and set plugins_load_at_startup/Satellites = false

For educational tasks you should use stable versions but I can't say ETA for release of 0.13.0 yet - we should fix few bugs still, which blocked release.