Celestia Forums

For debugging celestia output, or testing certain addons, it is unsuitable to wait for celestia scanning the whole extras folder tree.

As the only way for now is either to move parts of the extras tree to another location, or rename ALL .scc, .dsc and .stc files inside with a different ending (added: ...or building and maintaining a complete celestia test/debug installation...), it can be easily seen that this is equal unsuitable (for example moving 2.3 GB of data back and forth).

A very fast and suitable solution would be if a certain name convention would prevent celestia from scanning a whole folder. For example a folder called 'Galaxies' could be renamed as 'Galaxies_NO', 'Galaxies_STOP' or 'Galaxies_SKIP' (a specified name part at the end starting with '_' and in capitals) to skip scanning for that directory - a fast way to hang things on and off.

If not too difficult, it would be nice to have this feature as soon as possible.

maxim

Maxim,

I agree that it would be a lot more convenient if it were possible to change the names of directories to prevent them from being loaded, and thus not have to rearrange the organization of your directories of Addons.

However...

"Move"ing a directory from one directory into another on the same disk does not involve copying any files.

If you have a Celestia directory named /no_extras/ (which Celelestia normally will not look into) you can move (not copy) folders into that directory to prevent them from being loaded. Under both Windows and Linux, if you drag the icon representing a directory from one directory to another one which is on the same disk, then only the pointers to the directory are changed, the actual contents of the directory are not copied from one place on the disk to another. Moving a 5GB directory is just as fast as moving an enpty directory (unless some program has files open in one or more of its subdirectories).

Does this help? Or am I misunderstanding your problem?

'on the same disk' is the problem actually. My celestia extras resides on it's own partition, and I'm currently short with space on the underlying disk. Mostly, moving involves an USB2 external HD, unfortunately

maxim

Maxim,

Ouch.
You're right: my technique doesn't work if you're mounting a partition onto the extras directory

Well, granting extras it's own partition is the only way to get something similar to symbolic links working under NTFS. Every of my celestia versions accesses the same addons collection.

maxim