No, porting the changes back to previous versions needs some work.
The parsers by themselves could probably be ported almost as is, but they build EOPEntry instances using the new constructor with rates. This is an incompatible change.
Ok, I think the patch for former versions (if needed) should only consist of allowing the usage of the latest IERS files (i.e. parsing them), not actually using the rates.
OK, the two features I wanted to add are now in the develop branch.
I had some problems, though. I was unable to use the derivatives in the interpolation of UT1-UTC (i.e. minus LOD). When I set the interpolation degree to 3, I need either two points and two derivatives or four points and no derivatives. If I use the former, I get huge errors in some tests, so I reverted to use only UT1-UTC and not its derivatives during interpolation.
This is weird, and should probably be investigated further, but honestly I don’t have the motivation to do it now, and we really need to ship 12.0 soon.
Here are some new about the IERS formats changes.
The changes are effective in the datacenter.iers.org site since November 6th.
The format changes affects all csv files (bulletinA, bulletinB, eop C04, rapid data) and affects some xml files (eopC04). Upcoming version 12.0 takes care of the new formats.
Previous versions of Orekit did neither support the csv files nor the EOP C04 in xml format, so I don’t think it is really needed to produce patch versions of older releases. In theory, I guess some users may have used the RapidDataAndPredictionXMLLoader with EOP C04 by fiddling with the supportedName and default loaders because all these XML formats are very close to each other (same content, but additional entries in headers), but I doubt this is widespread and then these users are really on their own by using a loader to parse files it was not designed to parse.
So I am leaning towards keeping the versions as is, with just 12.0 supporting the new formats and not patching the older versions. What do you think?
+1 for keeping the versions as is.
+1 for this also