[GRASS5] The status of 5.0

[Markus Neteler]

On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 08:14:00AM +0000, Glynn Clements wrote:
> 
> Roger Miller wrote:
> 
> > > Actually, I suspect that's likely to be a catch-22 situation. In order
> > > to become truly fixed and completely stable, 5.0 needs a lot more
> > > testing than it will get while it remains "in development". To get an
> > > adequate level of testing, it will need to be put into real-world use;
> > > which probably means declaring it to be "released".
> > 
> > I doubt that the general public wants to be your beta-testers.
> 
> They would doubtless prefer that all of the bugs had been found first. 
> But if they've been using a computer for more than a week, they will
> also have realised that this just doesn't happen.
> 
> If users absolutely insisted that software was 100% bug free, the
> software industry would be as dead as the proverbial dodo, and the
> industry "leader", Microsoft, would probably have been the first to
> go.

... and please keep in mind: bugfixing for GRASS is quite often done
in less than 48h - the response times are quite high. For difficult bugs
it's of course different, but those should not delay severely a release
unless they are on library level. We have to better communicate known
bugs in the man pages. If a bug only appears under certain circumstances
for a minority of users, that's no reason to delay everything.

Going back to the initial mail for this thread: Most problems with
vector processing in GRASS are related to odd data, not to the modules.
What GRASS is really lacking is a tool to clean up non-topological
vector data to be processed in a topological GIS. When generating
the vectors within GRASS, the vector capabilities are quite functional.

Probably the topological  clean up of imported data should be separated
from the import modules (e.g. v.in.shape) to have this issue for
transparent for the users. Only then some will realize, that SHAPE is
the problem and not the (certainly limited) 2D vector engine of GRASS.

Markus