This is primarily a maintenance release to assure that build problems
on some distros are addressed in released code, but there are a few bug
fixes in it as well.
Notable changes since release 2.1.8:
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Github issue #203: Xastir can now use either the legacy version of PCRE (sometimes referred to in package management systems as "PCRE3") or the current, supported version, PCRE2. The legacy version has been deprecated since 2015 and is no longer under development, and some Linux distributions are starting to remove legacy PCRE and any package that depends on it from their package management systems. This change assures that Xastir can remain in those systems.
If PCRE2 is installed and shapelib support is enabled, then PCRE2 is used even if legacy PCRE is installed. If legacy PCRE is installed, PCRE2 is not found, and shapelib support is enabled, then legacy PCRE will be used.
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Github issue #199: A bug was fixed that caused the station lists dialogs to suffer an off-by-one error when a user clicked on a station in the list, centering the map not on the station clicked, but the one following it.
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Github issue #25: Code that worked around API changes in extremely old versions of ImageMagick has been removed. The minimum version of ImageMagick now supported by Xastir is 6.6.9, which is itself quite old.
Users are reminded that Xastir cannot support ImageMagick 7 at this time and only ImageMagick 6 (the legacy version) can be used. Users continue to be advised to use GraphicsMagick instead.
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Github issue #156: The default display level for shapefile maps with no associated dbfawk or with a dbfawk that fails to initialize display level has been changed so the default behavior of such maps is to display them at all zoom levels. Previously, the default value was too small for them to be seen at full world zoom levels.
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Github issue #202 and others: Numerous deprecated macros have been removed from configure.ac, which stops "bootstrap.sh" from reporting annoying deprecation warnings with inappropriate messages about how to fix them.
This change does have the potential of breaking Xastir builds on extremely old operating systems with compilers that do not fully implement the C89 and C99 standards. Further, a minor issue with configure.ac that prevented it from working properly with GCC 13 was fixed (pull request #204).
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Pull request #185: A failure to initialize a value caused builds of Xastir on Cygwin to fail to connect to internet servers.
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Github issue #121: One further fix was made to allow Xastir to accept GPS sentences without regard to what "talker" produced them. Partial fixes to this issue were present in version 2.1.8, but until this version there were still some GPS devices whose sentences would be ignored solely because we were making assumptions about the "talker" identification letters.
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Pull request #186: A misuse of a "bash" specific shell syntax would cause Xastir's configure script when run under any other shell to fail to recognize a working "gv" installation, and therefore conclude it could not print maps. This was primarily a problem on operating systems for which the default root shell was not bash, and on which Xastir was being built by root (this was clearly happening when Xastir was being installed from FreeBSD's ports system, since root's default shell is usually /bin/csh or /bin/sh (the real Bourne shell, not bash)).
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Versions of Xastir built from a git clone of the Xastir repository will now show in the Help->About dialog a detailed description of the source code state that was used when it was built. This output is taken from "git describe" and shows not only the git commit from which the code was built, but how many commits there have been since the last release and whether the repository was clean or not.
This feature is only enabled when the Xastir source tree was an actual git clone, not if it just happens to have been a tarball unpacked into some other git repository (as happens often in the git repositories of package management systems). Binaries built from tarballs (even if those tarballs are unpacked in some other git repo) will report only their version number in the Help->About dialog.