In theory you’re right, and approval should be enough. In practice, virtually every release winds up having some sort of surprise.

Gateway airports need to be approved before they are “released for inclusion in the next release”, so this should be enough to have it whitelisted to be “automagically” updated in the sim.

Maybe the process to get an approval would need to expanded with more checks to make sure it would not crash everyone’s sim worldwide, but I’m guessing this approval should be enough… no?

I tried of the no hyphen with same results, just forgot to mention it. However Python version was the angry cat, I am on 3.6.6 due to me using the pyinstaller, which only works in that..

Case solved.

For the Python package? Sure, let’s just use the project’s Github issue tracker.

Ah, remove the hyphen—try xplane_airports not x-plane_airports. (This is “wrong” in the sense that 100% of our marketing materials use the hyphen, but it conforms to Python naming conventions.)

Also make sure you’re on Python 3.7! (I’m lazy, and this is an offshoot of an internal tool, so I’m not keen on removing the 3.7 dependencies… plus, once you use some of the new 3.7 tools, you’ll never look back to 3.6 or earlier.)

We too would like to see more frequent Gateway releases. It’s a little bit scary because it’s always possible that a new Gateway airport could introduce issues with the sim—for instance, I remember a particular scenery pack in the Portland area that would take upwards of 10 minutes to load in 10.50! And of course it’s always possible (albeit unlikely) that some airport could cause an outright crash.

That’s part of the reason we’ve been making Gateway releases a part of the normal beta process. (The other reason, of course, is that doing so requires no new infrastructure on our end! 😀 ) Thus, any plan on our end to decouple Gateway releases from the betas would have to figure out how we handle problem airports.

But yeah, it’s definitely a long-term goal of ours to push Gateway airports more frequently!

I’m not a developer who could do that unfortunately so I’ll defer to much better folks. However the stretch goal of making a system work like that is intriguing. One of the few downsides of the Gateway is that updated scenery is only pushed with updates to X-Plane itself. My thought was that perhaps a system to query and pull updated airports automagically, maybe even built into XP11 itself, could someday be possible and thus make the Gateway a practically live scenery database (upon airport approvals by Julian of course).

The primary target is people who are doing analysis or automated manipulation of airports. E.g., Markku Uttula built this awesome map visualization of all 35,000+ airports… complete with a rendering of the runways when you click on an individual airport. Someone who wanted to build something similar in Python could get quite a head start using this library.

While it wasn’t my primary goal, it’s certainly the case that an ambitious user could use this to build an add-on that downloads you the latest copy of every airport, every day. (There are a few sharp edges to this—you’d need to make sure the scenery.ini de-prioritizes the Gateway airports, for instance. But it’s certainly possible.)

(If you’re a third party dev interested in doing this, please give me a shout—I’d like to run some back-of-the-envelope calculations on your proposed design to make sure the server load won’t be too crazy.)