xtide for DEBIAN
----------------

The Debian package has ready-to-use (fully configured) `tide' and `xtide'
binaries.  You may try out xtide without any additional data, but this
package only has tidal information about one location near San Francisco.
For normal usage, you'll need the xtide-data package which contains the
required harmonics data.

Alternatively, you may download the harmonics.tcd data files from :

  ftp://bel-marduk.unh.edu/xtide/
 or
  http://www.flaterco.com/xtide/files.html#harmonicsfiles

--

The web server `xttpd' may optionally be started at boot time by editing
/etc/init.d/xttpd (setting the PORT variable and uncommenting out the
line).  Users who don't have root access (or if you already have a web
server running on port 80) can set a high port number (e.g., 8080), and
find the server running at http://your.site.net:8080/ instead of
http://your.site.net/ (http://localhost:8080/ also works).  Set the
environment variable XTTPD_FEEDBACK in /etc/init.d/xttpd to change the mail
feedback address.

--

Option:  World Vector Shoreline

You may then wish to consider if you want to install the World Vector
Shoreline (WVS) files to enable XTide to draw coastlines on the map.  (This
only works for XTide 2.5 or newer.)

This step is optional because the data files are large, the
functionality is very CPU-intensive, and the ability to predict tides is
not affected.  It is not advisable to install the WVS files on a machine
slower than a 500 MHz PC.  If you decide to install them:

   1. Download the gzipped tar file of WVS data from
      http://www.flaterco.com/xtide/files.html <files.html>.

      e.g. ftp://ftp.flaterco.com/xtide/wvs.tar.gz  (41 MB)

      One of these file (wvs3.dat) is not used by XTide.  To save on
      download bandwidth, I have created a bzip2 archive of the WVS files
      without this file and have made it accessible at:

       http://people.debian.org/~psg/xtide-coastline-20020226.tar.bz2

      It is 34 MB in size, shaving 7 MB off the download.

   2. Create a directory to contain the WVS files.

      e.g. /usr/local/share/xtide-coastline

   3. Change your current working directory to that directory.
   4. Unpack the tar file in that directory.
   5. Either set the environment variable WVS_DIR to the name of that
      directory or supply the directory name as the second line of the
      configuration file /etc/xtide.conf.

The WVS data may be packaged for Debian at a later time (if the 'data'
section of the archive is ever made a reality).  For now, the package would
be rather big to upload to Debian.

--

The upstream man pages were edited to reflect these Debian-specific
changes.

Note: As of package 2.1.99dev1-1, the configuration file listing all
      harmonics files is now /etc/xtide.conf instead of
      /etc/xtide/harmonicspath

Note: As of package 2.4-1, the configuration file /etc/xtide.conf lists
      only the directory name /usr/share/xtide, such that xtide picks up
      all files located there.  They have been moved into the xtide-data
      package.

Peter S Galbraith <psg@debian.org>  Wed, 13 Oct 1999 14:13:27 -0400
John Lapeyre <lapeyre@homey.physics.arizona.edu>, Fri, 24 Jul 1998 15:05:14
