missing textures for planets

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

Binary package hint: celestia

Earth, Mercury, the Sun's, and some additional textures are present (e.g. Venus seems correct, one asteroid texture was found to be present for "... Saturn III..."), but most planets (Saturn, Mars, etc.) and moons are simply shown as white orbs.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: celestia-gnome 1.6.0+dfsg-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-17.26-generic 2.6.32.10+drm33.1
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-17-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Mar 27 12:56:47 2010
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Beta amd64 (20100318)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=fr_CA.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: celestia

[Josh Leverette (coder543)]

This really made me sad to see. Celestia is such an awesome program... i wonder what's wrong.

[Josh Leverette (coder543)]

oh, and i'm 32 bit

[Josh Leverette (coder543)]

Woooooooooooow. For real, people??? What kind of lunatic packagers do we have around here? Celestia is USELESS without its textures... and the ubuntu packagers (or debian or somebody) decided it would be lovely to have all the rest of the textures packed away in a nonfree package that celestia DOES NOT depend on. So no one, but a console/synaptic junkie is going to figure out the problem. It could at least say so in the description! better yet, why don't we put a dependency? :O whoa. brilliant. Sorry.. this just gets to me in the wrong way. Ubuntu is about SIMPLICITY and USABILITY. It is NOT about Free vs NonFree absolutism. Pleeeeeaaaaseeee fix this bug. Yes. Right now. In the middle of an LTS release. Not in the next release cycle. This is an I-made-a-horrible-mistake-and-will-shame-myself-enough-to-correct-mid-LTS type mistake. Man Up.

[Josh Leverette (coder543)]

Oh, and solution: http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=15918

[Josh Leverette (coder543)]

(Oh, and the whole not-fix-things-mid-cycle is only policy. This guy clearly reported the bug before the final version was out and about. Be humble enough to recognize that where a grave mistake was made, an exception which can retroactively fix this mistake should be made. Other than sticking to whats always been done, what logical reason is there for *not* fixing this extreme case of dependency failure? I think its time to break out of the mold for a minute.)

[Josh Leverette (coder543)]

Well, i'm pretty sure this bug is still present in Natty. Sorry about earlier comments, it really blew my mind that the package maintainers would debilitate Celestia like this. Can we please fix it now?

[Andrew Tribick (ajtribick)]

As a Celestia developer, I can say it is definitely clear that this bug is affecting users as evidenced by several threads in our forums from Ubuntu users asking about why the textures are missing - these are obviously the people who have been bothered to report it, rather than just uninstalling the application as being bug-ridden. Have to say it is quite frustrating to see our hard work being so casually undermined by this frankly rather stupid decision about the packaging: how does serving a broken application help anyone?

In any case we now have Celestia 1.6.1 out, maybe it would be possible to take the opportunity to package it in a more sensible way?

[Josh Leverette (coder543)]

I strongly agree. This is horrible and stupid. Nobody wins by doing this, and nobody wins by continuing to ignore this bug. Why is it that suddenly Mars and Jupiter have no textures? Because somebody decided not to write one extra line in the celestia package denoting that it required the texture pack. ITS NOT EVEN AN ADD-ON IN THE SOFTWARE CENTER! How is Stellarium an Add-On? I might actually respect the developers at Celestia for moving to get Celestia pulled from Ubuntu if Canonical continues to allow this disrespect of their work. It isn't right. Will *anyone* please comment on this matter? Its been solidly ignored for a year and four months. I think this bug is setting a record of some kind. I love ubuntu, and I love launchpad, but this needs attention.

[nameremoved (errorwhywhywhy-deactivatedaccount)]

I modified the name that the program uses when looking for the mars texture, and this works for me.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "solsys.ssc" of this bug report has been identified as being a patch. The ubuntu-reviewers team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review the patch. In the event that this is in fact not a patch you can resolve this situation by removing the tag 'patch' from the bug report and editing the attachment so that it is not flagged as a patch. Additionally, if you are member of the ubuntu-reviewers team please also unsubscribe the team from this bug report.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by Brian Murray. Please contact him regarding any issues with the action taken in this bug report.]

[Travisgevans (travisgevans)]

Apparently affects 10.04 LTS also. It's pretty sad that I had to search the bug list just to figure out why half the textures were not working and verify that it wasn't a graphics driver/card issue.

There is no excuse for deliberately breaking a package by hiding half of the files elsewhere, not add any dependencies, not include any notice in the description, and make trouble for the Celestia developers who get the blame for something that is not their fault. If Ubuntu could not use a reasonable licensing policy, then it would have made much more sense to put the entire Celestia package, UNBROKEN, into the non-free repo, or to give some kind of conspicuous notice when installing the package.

I don't see how it's remotely reasonable for someone to take significant time away from other work fixing bugs and such in the distro to go over *every single file* in some random, relatively obscure package, and single out *individual* files not to include in the package, without any regard whatsoever for whether these files are important to the package, and without making it clear to the users installing the package that this was done.

[Richard Bruce Baxter (richardbrucebaxter)]

Celestia is broken without these basic textures. The Ubuntu user must be notified of that they are receiving an incomplete software program (the fact they are not installing Celestia but an incomplete version thereof). The user should not made to spend 30 minutes+ trawling through the internet to find out why it is missing things. And that is assuming they know what search strings to try typing into google to find the problem. NB they would have already spent at least 30 minutes finding out that it is missing various things, and if they are new to the program they may not even realise that things are missing.

[JoseLuisTriana (theunfor)]

You should advice the user that we need the f***ing nonfree textures... right now in my desktop jupiter looks like an egg....

Excuse my words but this is MORONIC.

[Sam Watkins (w-sam-l)]

They're in celestia-common-nonfree.

[Sam Watkins (w-sam-l)]

not a bug?

[Sam Watkins (w-sam-l)]

I don't know why the hell those textures would be non-free, presumably their based on NASA stuff all of which is in the public domain. Maybe a non-free derived work of public domain NASA images. :(

[Matthew Champion (matchampion0)]

Hello I'm not shure of the rights involved i hope i havent done anything to rights infringing. but i just copied over the old textures files from an old version of celestia i had on a an download in tar.gz form. i extracted the tar.gz i overwrote the texture files in the new install and also overwrote the solarsys.ssc file withthe old one i had in the data directory and i have had no problems. you have to alow root on you computer sudo-i i think dose it. then just move files around in the terminal. im sure its easy enoufgh to get hold of a older tar.gz somwhere on the net. no problems