GRASS Wish List

[Craig Anderson]

Fellow GU/GP's:
	
	On the recommendation of McCauley at Purdue, I propose to keep an active
list of user requested utilities in hopes that some of the most needed things
will be developed sooner than otherwise.  Ideally this list could be updated 
at least every week or two to be sure potential development is best routed
to the users true needs.
	
	Additionally, some funding for development could come from the users
themselves.  Once list was developed and priorities established, users could
then donate a few hundred dollars.  Any way that you look at it, a few hundred
dollars is a mere pittance compared to a commercial system of $10,000 or more!
Not to mention that the whole user community would benefit.  Just to play with
numbers, $250.00 X 25 users = $6250.00, this would pay for a full time programmer for a few days for sure.  Admittedly the following concerns would
be valid:
	
	a.  "I donated X dollars but joe in the next building didn't donate a
dime and he still benefits from my developmental money."  True, some people will
not give but only take, it is a problem to be realized at the outset, the question
is how badly do you want development to proceed at a quickened pace.
	b.  "I think that group X rather than group Y should do the actual 
development."  This should be worked out in advance with a best fit solution for
the whole group and not selected sub-groups.

	Utilities that "OUR' organization could use right now are as follows:


	d.what.sites - an interactive query tool for displaying position and
attribute information about a site on the monitor.
	
	d.sites - with an option to display site labels on the display
monitor.
	
	s.to.rast - an imporoved version that creates raster map layer of a 
determined grid resolution with carry over of site attribute data.  It would
also be nice if there were options which could handle two points in one output
raster cell in different ways, (ie.. mean, max, min etc..)
	
	ps.map - improved to allow for multiple panel printing
	
	s.mask.what - a utility to extract points falling within a user specified
raster/vector category/polygon (not necessarily rectangular) and putting those points lat/long/att into an ascii output file.


Comments are welcomed, Craig
caa at noaacrd.colorado.edu