Star catalog downloader does not recognise pre-download catalogues

[Matthew Gates]

If the user has already downloaded star catalgs, the "download extra catalogs" feature in the configuration dialog does not recognise this, and will try to re-download the files.

This is a waste of a user's bandwidth.

It also seems that sometimes this feature can get confused if there is a corrupted or missing stars.ini file, and will cause problems.

See forum posts:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=6957643

[Mike Storm (oopsdude)]

Technically, this is not a bug, but I understand the concern. The reason that StarMgr checks stars.ini instead of loading everything in <root>/stars/default is so that the user can add and remove catalogs without re-downloading them. Originally, there was also more information in stars.ini, such as version and size information, but that got removed upon request. Would you prefer that Stellarium simply load all catalogs it can find?

That said, I'm not opposed to adding an "Auto Detect" button for importing old catalogs. Or the downloader could check whether the next catalog already exists when the user clicks the "Download" button. In any case, I'll work on making the catalog loading more robust.

Mike

[cardiff1 (cardiff1)]

Hello;
I didn't realize that I could post here. I added some additional details regarding the reported issue in the loader HERE:
https://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=6976326

[LohPhat (lohphat)]

I'm seeing related behavior where if only a subset of the 5 catalogs is downloaded and then the program exits, it restarts at catalog 1.

[Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab)]

LohPhat, the cause of the behaviour you describe is unrelated to this bug/missing feature. Please, see this Q/A for a solution:
https://answers.launchpad.net/stellarium/+question/91133

[Fabien Chéreau (xalioth)]

I recoded this part of the code, please confirm that the bug is fixed on the SVN version.
Fabien

[Glen Scurr (scurr67)]

Working nicely here. After building 5629 I had the option to download catalog 5 of 9. It said it was downloading star catalog 4. There must be a default or a nebula catalog in there. When done, I exited, relaunched Stellarium and I had the option to download 6 of 9. It seems all good.

[Glen Scurr (scurr67)]

I should have said that this was on Ubuntu 9.10.

[Fabien Chéreau (xalioth)]

The reason it display catalog 5 for the file stars4 is that the first catalog is called stars0...
Fabien