Document correlation set rebuilding process

* INSTALL: Add a new section documenting the way in which newer
correlation data sets can be rebuilt and substituted for officially
distributed copies.
This commit is contained in:
Jeremy Stanley
2014-02-13 01:54:21 +00:00
parent 676e13b0be
commit 49a6ebe760

40
INSTALL
View File

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
Basic Unix Installation Instructions for the Weather Utility
==============================================================
:Copyright: (c) 2006-2012 Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org>. Permission
:Copyright: (c) 2006-2014 Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org>. Permission
to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software is
granted under terms provided in the LICENSE file distributed
with this software.
@@ -66,3 +66,41 @@ Manuals
Optionally, the weather.1 and weatherrc.5 files can be placed in sane
locations for TROFF/NROFF manual files on your system (for example,
/usr/local/share/man/ or ~/man/).
Updating Correlation Sets
-------------------------
The version control repository and tarballs are occasionally updated
with refreshed correlation sets (the files which track what the nearest
stations and weather zones are to various places). If you find you need
to generate updated correlation sets yourself, however, it can be done.
You'll need to retrieve the most recent source databases from the
different sites mentioned in the comments at the top of a recent
correlation data file--each one includes a comment block with a list of
the origins and checksums of the data files used along with the date and
time they were built. You'll also want to generate recent slist and
zlist files (look at the comments at the top of each for the shell
commands used to generate them). You probably also need the most recent
overrides.conf from the weather source repository or tarball, since that
contains known corrections for errors in the original data. Put all of
these files in your current working directory and then call::
weather --build-sets
Then wait, and wait, and wait some more. After loading and analyzing the
source data, it will guess an upper-bound for the number of great-arc
distance calculations it may have to perform and attempt to give you a
progress bar indicating percent completion. If you're lucky, it will
finish successfully also generate some automated quality assurance
analysis of the results (mostly checking for obviously bad airports,
stations, zones). If you are UNlucky, it will break, which is not
terribly uncommon because the government-provided source data is often
misformatted or gets sudden schema changes requiring updates to the
parsing routines in weather.
If you're using a system-wide (for example, distribution packaged) copy
of weather and its data, you may want to place the new airports,
stations, places, zctas and zones files into your ~/.weather directory
and make use of the setpath configuration or command-line options to
override where weather looks for them. See the weather(1) and
weatherrc(5) manpages for details.