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Welcome to the Village Pump. This page is used to discuss the technical issues, operations and guidelines of the FlightGear wiki.

Please add new topics to the bottom of this page.

Old discussions should be moved to a FlightGear wiki:Village pump/Archive YEAR. These discussions can then be moved to a relevant talk page if appropriate.

MediaWiki updated to 1.39.6

We have updated MediaWiki to its latest LTS version 1.39.6 today. Although we've tested the update, chances are that we've missed certain scenarios or features. Please report any issues that you may encounter.

Gijs (talk) 09:31, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Embedded YouTube videos broken

It seems that the EmbedVideo extension was removed at some point. Consequently, pages such as Howto:Creating FlightGear Promo Videos are broken. At present, the best replacements seems to be a fork and Extension:YouTube.

—Red Leader (talk, contribs) 19:21, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Hi,

Thanks for the report. It was introduced by today's update, but should be fixed now.

Gijs (talk) 21:21, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Confirmed, thanks. And I’d completely forgotten about {{wikipedia}}. 😅

Red Leader (talk, contribs) 21:57, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Forum registration problem

Hello, I would like to register on the forum, but I tried several times without success. I sent an email to the administrator some time ago, but it seems to have been lost. I don't know what to do, is there somebody here who could help? Please tell me if you need additional information. Thanks very much in advance. Kestrel (talk) 13:14, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi,

That's unfortunate! You can find my email address at https://forum.flightgear.org/contact.php Please try again if you've done that before, I'll actively monitor the address for any incoming messages, and let me know if you don't get a reply.

Gijs (talk) 15:01, 25 March 2024 (UTC) (forum admin)

Sidebar link for "Build server" is broken

Hello,

Just wanted to bring to someones attention that the URL for "Build server" currently 404s. Not sure if this resource still exists or if its URL has changed.

Cheers! -Joshua

Hi Joshua,

The URL is still correct, but the build server is temporarily down due to a server failure. It's being worked on, so should be back up "soon".

Gijs (talk) 12:29, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

FlightGear Wikipedia article image needs correctly sourced Flightgear wiki screenshot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlightGear

The image used for the Flightgear Wikipedia article appears to have been deleted, because it was sourced from the following Flightgear-wiki screenshot page:

File:Bo 105 over Sint Marteen.png

which referred to an imgur link instead of the following thread, which gives a CC license based on a google search of the file name:

https://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=88&t=32163&start=0

Discussion on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Files_for_discussion/2024_December_7#File:FlightGear_Flight_Sim_Bo_105_over_Sint_Marteen.png

> Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the file's talk page or in a deletion review).

The person who uploaded it, or someone from the wiki, should ideally fix the FlightGear wiki page, and do a deletion review for the Wikipedia file. The file may have been used in multiple pages since screenshots are uncommon on Wikipedia due to proprietary apps. Feel free to remove this comment once it's taken care of. Good luck

Issues with three templates

Hi,

The fgmeta commit template appears to be broken. It used to work in the first Note here (see the URL).

Also, I tried to use Template:Repo_link#Site:_Generic to create a link to the CMake repo, but didn't manage: IIRC, the link text was empty.

Finally, Template:Fgmeta_source doesn't seem to to what the doc. says for simplepath: with

{{fgmeta source
| path = download_and_compile.sh
| simplepath = 1
}}

the link text starts with a slash, so I used

{{fgmeta source
| path = download_and_compile.sh
| text = download_and_compile.sh
}}

which is of course more redundant.

Thanks for considering! :-)

Rominet (talk)

Good catch. I need to look into that one. I may not have coded the commit part of GitLab into the master {{repo_link}} template.

Bugman (talk) 15:41, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

All fixed. It was quite simple - the {{fgmeta_source}} template was missing the proj parameter. I've also fixed {{fgmeta_clone}}.

Bugman (talk) 15:53, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply and fixes, Bugman! (And sorry for the delay, I didn't see any notification...) I see the first item is indeed addressed. Regarding the second item, well, I see no place where I'd really want to use this now on the d&c page, so didn't test it. As for the third one, I still get /download_and_compile.sh in the Preview when I try the above {{fgmeta_source}} snippet with simplepath = 1.

I looked at {{fgmeta_clone}} too; it looks nice but seems to default to the git:// protocol. Would it be possible to make it default to using https://? Thanks again. :-)

Rominet (talk)

Not a problem. For the simplepath parameter, that is the designed behaviour in the {{repo link}} template. In most cases our repositories have complex directory structures and the desired output is the absolute file path, removing the protocol and URL parts of the path. Do you wish to simply have the file name there? No one had asked for that before, so I never added an option for that. In the case of the source repositories, you often want to remove the first part of the absolute path so that for example in SimGear, /simgear/scene/util/QuadTreeBuilder.hxx ({{simgear source|path=simgear/scene/util/QuadTreeBuilder.hxx|simplepath=1}}) would be shown as scene/util/QuadTreeBuilder.hxx ({{simgear source|path=simgear/scene/util/QuadTreeBuilder.hxx|text=scene/util/QuadTreeBuilder.hxx}}. This is not scriptable in MediaWiki so I left it all for the text parameter.

For the protocol, I have now added the protocol parameter. E.g. {{fgmeta clone | protocol = https}}. That will give git clone https://gitlab.com/flightgear/fgmeta.git (as of today generated as git clone https://gitlab.com/flightgear/fgmeta.git).

Bugman (talk) 08:51, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks Bugman, I've updated the download_and_compile.sh page to use {{fgmeta clone | protocol = https}} as you proposed; it works great. For the link to download_and_compile.sh, I can continue to use {{fgmeta source | path = download_and_compile.sh | text = download_and_compile.sh}}, no problem.

As far as I'm concerned, everything is resolved here, so this thread/section can be deleted if someone wants to “clean up”.

Other subject: the only remaining thing is that I didn't receive any notification, neither for your replies here nor for the January changes by Jebba to the download_and_compile.sh page that is on my watchlist. I used to receive email notifications for these things years ago, haven't changed my preferences regarding this and don't see any setting that would explain why I don't receive these notifications anymore. Maybe email sending by the wiki software is not quite well configured according to current standards (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)?

Rominet (talk)

Improve the 'simgear clone', 'flightgear clone' and 'fgdata clone' templates

Hi,

In order to improve Fedora_Packages_and_Compiling, it would be nice to have the {{simgear clone}}, {{flightgear clone}} and {{fgdata clone}} templates on par with {{fgmeta clone}} (support for the protocol parameter, etc.). I tried

{{simgear clone | protocol = https | opt = --single-branch --branch release/2024.1 | post = simgear}}

but it doesn't seem to work, as the preview shows this:

git clone --single-branch --branch release/2024.1 git://gitlab.com simgear

(ditto with flightear clone and fgdata clone). Thanks in advance :-)

Rominet (talk)

I needed a while to work out the best strategy for these changes. I've now gone through all of the {{repo link}} cloning subtemplates listed on {{repo link/doc related}} and added the project parameter to the templates and the optional protocol parameter. These changes were required as the gl section of the {{repo_link}} template is constructed differently to the sf section. I've also updated the git cloning documentation {{repo link/doc git clone}}. I hope this covers everything you need.

Bugman (talk) 07:48, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, Bugman, this works great! Your changes allowed me to perform this edit in Fedora_Packages_and_Compiling. The only remaining git clone command written in full on that page is for FG's fork of OpenSceneGraph at GitLab. I understand that choosing a proper name for an applicable {{... clone}} template probably requires some careful thinking... ;-)

Rominet (talk)

Default text in Template:Repo link

Hi,

The default text in {{Repo link}} gives somewhat pleasant link texts such as

flightgear/flightgear/src/Scripting/NasalSys.cxx

when the site is sourceforge, however the result looks like a bug for other sites (though I understand this may be as intended). To be clear, the URLs are correct but the default link texts look weird because they start with the unqualified site name rather than the fully-qualified domain name. For instance,

{{fgmeta source}}

yields gitlab/flightgear/fgmeta/next rather than gitlab.com/flightgear/fgmeta/next. I suggest to replace gitlab with gitlab.com in the default text (where the HTML comment says “Site advertising”) and do the same for github.

Note: the Gitorious web site doesn't exist anymore, maybe that should be removed from the template?

Thanks for considering; I can do the replacement if you wish.

Rominet (talk) 10:38, 12 November 2025 (UTC)

Sounds sensible, so please go ahead!

Regarding Gitorious, it may be nice to link to an archived version of the repos, such as https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory/?origin_url=https://gitorious.org/flightgear/fgdata.git&visit_type=git Altough this only makes sense for repos or branches that are not part of our current GitLab...

Gijs (talk) 13:58, 12 November 2025 (UTC)

Done, thanks Gijs!

One should be careful using this, though, because the resulting link texts may be non-existing URLs (after prepending the protocol) despite looking like valid ones, as shown by the first example in User:Rominet/Sandbox#FGMeta-Python repo templates!

So, to avoid people getting trapped by this, maybe the default link text should start with something like [GitLab]/... rather than the gitlab.com/... I just put (to make it clear that such link texts are not supposed to be “Internet addresses”).

Rominet (talk) 16:20, 12 November 2025 (UTC)

This is now implemented. For instance, {{fgmeta-python source | path = pyproject.toml | tag = 1.0.0b1 }} results in [GitLab]/flightgear/fgmeta-python/1.0.0b1/pyproject.toml. This also holds for GitHub and GitoriousIsNowClosed. SourceForge has no such prefix for now (it initially didn't, and editing its part of {{Repo link}} requires a bit more temerity than what I have at the moment :-)).

Rominet (talk) 09:15, 14 November 2025 (UTC)

That's a good idea. Note for Gitorious - I added this because there are a number of historical documents/pages that refer to developments that occurred on Gitorious which were not migrated to SourceForge. I originally made the Gitorious links work by pointing to the archive by the Internet Archive (see Gitorious). However that archive has been offline for a few years now. The Internet Archive are storing all the data so it may return one day.

Bugman (talk) 22:06, 13 November 2025 (UTC)