Weather and cities

[reno-a]

Many cities are not repertoried (test for french cities).
If big cities are found, other (yet important) not. Howeve, towns easy to find for others desktop-environment (like Xfce, GNOME).

To read other remarks on the Net, it seems that even indicating geographical coordinates it does not work (but I don't try it).

MATE general version

1.16 & 1.20

Linux Distribution

Debian Stable & Sid
Fedora 28

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[vkareh]

@reno-a - do you have examples of cities that fail for you? The data in this library is actually hard-coded based on airport codes.

We can easily add new cities to the list, as long as we have airport codes to match, but we don't (yet) have a way of live-querying other cities...

[reno-a]

Hello @vkareh,
Thank-you for your response.
The most cities don't have airport, and the list is be long (especially if you have to manually enter the names of cities and their coordinates)...
No doubt that the library of airport cities is not the best solution.
I think than other Desktop Environment use another method, which gives bests results.
Your opinion ?

[reno-a]

Open Weather (https://www.openweathermap.org/) lists more than cities.
Perhaps can it be included ?

[eehpcm]

@vkareh
Airport code EGFA. The grandly-named runway called West Wales Airport has recently installed an automated Met service announced here. There's a nice looking web interface. I don't know if it supplies data you can pick up, or passes it on to somewhere that you can pick it up.

Their website doesn't make it easy to figure out where they are, so you might find this useful. The marker is at 52.1158, -4.5609.

I had a dig around but couldn't find any data file listing locations and where/how they get weather data (but I could easily have missed it). Is it something I could add in myself if I knew where the file was or do I have to wait for you to update the app (assuming you can get a weather feed for it.?

[kuntalkundu]

linux mint provide a weather applet for panel which is supported by yahoo weather. is it possible to do like that, i.e yahoo or open weather support? my city has no airport.

[vkareh]

Most cities have no weather station. Even cities with airports often don't report their weather data upstream. The result is that pretty much all weather services do geolocation based on the entered city, and give you the weather data from the nearest weather station, which is usually the closest large city with an airport (but not always).

Other desktop environments take advantage of this and do the following:

1. User enters city name
2. Applet searches on OpenStreetMaps (or similar service) to determine latitude and longitude
3. Query some third-party service with those coordinates
   That third-party service will then find the closest weather station (which is most likely not in the city the user searched for) and feed that data back to the applet

We could do the same on our side. It would remove the burden of maintaining the huge list of weather station codes manually. However, the @mate-desktop/core-team need to be all in agreement of which services we use, and the licensing terms of such services need to match the values of the project.

Then there are the code changes necessary to support this, which would be quite large. I'd love to have some time to do this.

[kuntalkundu]

We are waiting for the change in mate weather applet. Openweather map integration or yahoo weather would be great choice.

[reno-a]

Openweather seems a better choice (more Open)

[vkareh]

OpenWeatherMap is a subscription service. Each user would need to subscribe and enter an API key to get weather data...

[flexiondotorg]

Is migrating to libgweather an option?

[raveit65]

There was already an old PR for mate-panel to switch to libgweather.
mate-desktop/mate-panel#429

[flexiondotorg]

Thanks for reference @raveit65, there appears to be some good reasons to keep libmateweather

[lukefromdc]

I think as a rule we should not include anything by default that depends on a subscription to anything

[raveit65]

Well, personal i can live that berlin has only one weather station with using libgweather. The different of weather reports are very small between the 2 airports.
I like the idea not to be responsible if a weather station is missing and all will be handled by libgweather ;)
One package less to maintain.

[kuntalkundu]

currently I have installed a package in Ubuntu MATE 18.04.2 named Cumulus which has a panel notification icon for weather and also a detail weather report window (optional) and this app is powered by OpenWeather. My town Balurghat is available here. I am attaching a SS of the app. and fortunately the notification icon does not disappears after reboot pc unlike simple weather indicator.

[ghost]

@vkareh wrong!

My supposedly small city, Muncie, Indiana, has an airport. KMIE.

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.19561500000003&lon=-85.37890999999996

Please let us use Weather.gov data if we have to.

[MagnusPGBerg]

Hi.
I'm not a Mate user but I'm interested in it. Therefore I read this thread. I have big experience in XFCE4 and Gnome. I can tell you that whose two (XFCE4 Weather Plugin & Gnome Weather) take the weather data from https://www.yr.no/?spr=eng More info about the api https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us

With this weather service you can set the coordinates, if you build that possibility into the application like XFCE4 Weather Plugin. Gnome Weather doesn't have that possibility. It has only names of places. But you can tweak it's places file with the coordinates and names as you wish. You don't need to build a airport to get weather reports or forecasts. :-)

I hope Mate Weather will go in this direction.

[HectorB-2020]

@reno-a - do you have examples of cities that fail for you? The data in this library is actually hard-coded based on airport codes.

I do. Actually I previously submitted a similar request before: mate-desktop/mate-panel#1285
I'm willing to add these places if you don't mind.

[MikePooh]

For city of Tbilisi Georgia (country). The default airport code sets to TBS, which is IATA code of Tbilisi International Airport. And the weather can't be obtained. Manually revising dconf and setting code to UGTB, which is ICAO code of TIA solves the problem.