[GRASS5] Leaving

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi Thierry,

On Sat, Nov 22, 2003 at 12:47:01PM +0100, Thierry Laronde wrote:
> We have some discussions (mainly monologues of my own) the past weeks
> and it seems clear that I'm not on the very same wavelength with others.

I've read some of your postings 
and got the feeling that they were insightful 
and thus helpful for the GRASS development community.

The problem might be a little bit the expectation you might
have about the GRASS community. GRASS is a huge beast and the community
is relatively fresh and small. 

Some of my responses to your emails might have sounded
discouraging, but I am watching and doing my very little share
for GRASS for about four years and this I've learned a couple 
of lesson (some bitter some sweet) about what is realistic with
GRASS or not.

We need people like you with technical expertise, needs
and motivation to drive further steps of GRASS developments.

Some other conversations about technical stuff
went in the direction about seeking consensus and this is always very hard 
in a huge group like this.

The third type of emails I saw just demonstrated that you had been
digging deeply into some GRASS implementation and design problems.
If you don't receive and answer on those, just go ahead and try 
to fix that stuff as you like. It mainly means that we do not have
a person that is really deep into those parts of GRASS.

> So the best method to see what is indeed the correct way is to test: I
> will go my own way starting from the last CERL public release, since my
> needs are not cutting edge ones and I have already done a fair amount 
> of cleaning (this means mainly deletions, and 
> standardisation/ansification is on the way ---and I have now a more 
> clear idea of the work done by Markus since, yes, one can not say that 
> if one wants to compile on a POSIX system with -Wall -Werror it does 
> compile out of the box!).

Yes, why not. This is about Free Software and experiments
can only help.
I believe that quite some improvement have been made
since the last CERL release(s). Thus I would encourage you
to try another starting point, because the results might be more
helpful for the more mainstream GRASS development.

> My plan are, too, to resurrect the X Window/Motif interface which is far
> more challenging, at least for me: I know at the moment strictly nothing
> about Motif programming and there has been a fair amount of changes
> since 1991...

Wow. I wounder a bit why someone would try to do so.
Tcl/Tk is very stable, 
though the current interfaces also have their drawbacks.
Motif or lesstif (Free Software) will not improve the look or
stability much.
If I had time for a shot on a GRASS interface, I'd use the wxPython.
Actually the interface descriptions can be used to easily contruct
something similiar to the current tcltkgrass with wxPython
and then you further.

> But open source is here precisely for people to learn and to adjust for
> their exact needs.

Yes, that is what Free Software is for.
	Bernhard
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