weewx-xtide 3.0 released: tide report in nine languages, plus non-English locale and timezone fixes

[John Kline]

weewx-xtide 3.0

The sample tide report now speaks nine languages, and two significant bugs
are fixed: WeeWX failed to start with weewx-xtide installed on systems
running a non-English locale, and tide stations in a different timezone than
the WeeWX server got shifted or missing events. No weewx.conf changes are
needed; this is a drop-in upgrade for English reports, and one lang line
turns on a translation.

What's new

• The sample report is internationalized. Nine languages ship: English,
  Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish.
  Pick one by setting lang on the report's stanza in weewx.conf (e.g.
  lang = de under [StdReport] [[XTideReport]]); the default remains
  English. A missing translation falls back to English one string at a
  time. Date formats follow the report language; month and weekday names
  come from the server's locale, as in WeeWX itself (use a full locale name
  such as lang = de_DE.UTF-8 to localize them too). The non-English
  translations are Beta, pending native-speaker review — corrections are
  welcome as GitHub issues. Details in the manual:
  Translating the tide page.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

• A user manual. Installation, configuration, the $xtide.events()
  and $xtide.graph() tags, and translating, at
  chaunceygardiner.github.io/weewx-xtide.

• weewx-xtide no longer crashes WeeWX startup under non-English locales.
  The tide program's event times are always English ("9:16 AM UTC"), but they
  were parsed with a locale-dependent AM/PM directive, and most non-English
  locales (German, French, Danish, Spanish, ...) define empty AM/PM
  designators — so parsing failed and WeeWX could not start. The AM/PM token
  is now handled explicitly; no locale affects it.

• Stations in a different timezone than the server now get correct
  events. Event times were parsed in the server's local timezone, so a
  station elsewhere got events shifted by the timezone difference, or none at
  all when the timezone abbreviation wasn't recognized. The tide program is
  now run in UTC mode (-z) and all times are handled in UTC, so any
  station/server combination works. Stations in the server's own timezone
  were always correct and are unaffected. This also fixes a possible
  one-hour error during the repeated hour of the autumn DST fall-back.

• 24-hour time labels where the locale calls for them. The sample skin's
  graph and tide-list labels use 24-hour form when the system locale has no
  AM/PM designators (as in most of continental Europe), where "9:16 AM" would
  have rendered as an ambiguous "9:16". Translated reports use each
  language's own date and time forms regardless of the server locale.

• xtide.py --test-service works again. It now honors --location and
  --prog; it previously ignored them in favor of a hard-coded location and
  a tide path that no longer exists.

Requirements

• Python 3.10
• WeeWX 4 or 5
• The xtide package (see the README)

Installing/upgrading

Download weewx-xtide.zip from this release, then:

weectl extension install weewx-xtide.zip

Restart WeeWX. No weewx.conf changes are needed when upgrading from 2.x —
add lang = <code> to the report's stanza only if you want a translated
page. Note that upgrading replaces the bundled skin (skins/xtide/) — if
you customized it, save a copy first.